At GDC 2018, NVIDIA showcased its brand new real-time ray tracing tech, RTX. NVIDIA RTX consists of a highly scalable ray-tracing technology running on NVIDIA Volta architecture GPUs and it was officially announced for DX12, although it is architected to support ray tracing through a variety of interfaces. Thankfully, NVIDIA is looking into bringing RTX to the Vulkan API.
According to reports, NVIDIA is already working on a new Ray Tracing extension for the Vulkan API under the name of VK_NV_raytracing. The green team claimed that it is willing to work with Khronos to create a multiplatform standard, though the main challenge right now will be to get both the DirectX 12 Ray Tracing and the Vulkan Ray Tracing to work in the most similar way possible.
In related news, Epic Games – who was one of the first to showcase the benefits of real-time ray tracing – is encouraging developers to actively use RTX for their games. As Sweeney told MCVUK, in 10 years developers may find only ray tracing solutions in Unreal Engine. For its GDC 2018 tech demo, Epic Games used a hybrid model that blends some aspects of ray tracing and rasterization together.
Sweeney also said that in two years, high-end GPUs will be powerful enough to run games with NVIDIA’s RTX ray tracing enabled. However, we already know that the first game supporting NVIDIA’s RTX tech will be released later this year, and this game is no other than Metro Exodus.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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