The world of computer graphics rapidly evolves with each generation.
With many new terms emerging, this article aims to help you understand what is RTX, how it matters for your next PC upgrade, and what you can expect as a result of using Nvidia’s graphics card offerings.
What is RTX?
At its core, Nvidia RTX technology encompasses a suite of hardware and software technologies, including RT cores dedicated to ray tracing calculations, Tensor cores for AI-accelerated features, and a host of software optimizations.
These allow users to enable advanced features such as ray tracing and DLSS in applications and games.
The most prominent benefit of going with Nvidia RTX graphic cards is industry-leading real-time ray tracing capabilities at a hardware level accelerated by the RT cores baked into the GPU to handle the high computational demands when tracing rays through a scene during gameplay.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fortnite see great visual benefits when enabling ray tracing with reflections appearing more distinct and life-like as well as improving how character models look in different lighting scenarios.
DLSS performance improvements
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This, however, comes at a cost. Whenever ray tracing is enabled, framerates will take a hit to overall performance due to the additional computational strain while the graphic card renders each light ray.
However, the Nvidia RTX suite has another trick up its sleeve to counteract the performance hit in the form of DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling.
In simple terms, DLSS uses AI to upscale images in real time from a lower-resolution image. This means that since the graphics card is rendering lower-resolution frames, it can generate a higher number of frames per second which improves the overall performance.
The end product with DLSS enabled is higher frame rates at a low to no cost of visual quality, delivering a great visual experience and smooth gameplay.
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New AI technology with RTX 40 Series
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Recently, the latest generation of RTX cards, the RTX 40 series, Nvidia introduces another technique to increase framerates with Frame Generation which inserts AI-generated frames between already rendered frames.
While this gives the perception of a greater frame rate, there are refinements and tuning needed to eliminate things like graphical artifacts appearing in low FPS scenes and input lag.
Since Frame Generation was only introduced recently, we could potentially see Nvidia reducing or eliminating these negative impacts as the technology matures.
You now know what Nvidia RTX brings and can better decide whether these graphics cards are worth your consideration.
For laptop recommendations, check out our top gaming laptop picks here.
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