NVIDIA RTX Technology

The latest line-up of the newest, fastest and most powerful GPUs (also known as Graphics Cards) are here! After months of teases, leaks and speculations; the GPU Production Leading Company NVIDIA Corporation has launched a new series of GPUs called RTX series.

1. RTX 2080 Ti
2. RTX 2080
3. RTX 2070 Ti
4. RTX 2070
5. RTX 2060 Ti

Many of you may ask WHY START A NEW SERIES WHEN YOU CAN CONTINUE WITH THE SAME BY JUST ADDING THE NUMBERS BY 50 OR 100? Well, that's what we're gonna talk here; along with other technical things such as the DLSS (DEEP LEARNING SUPER SAMPLING) & Ray Tracing technology, GFLOPS, etc.

So, why exactly did NVIDIA create a new series of Graphic Cards? Well, for plethora of reasons, with

1. GDDR6 Memory

2. Completely re-imagined TURING Architecture

3. Ray Tracing Technology

4. Rasterizaion

5. Artificial Intelligence

are some of the reasons to begin with. Let us see them one by one!

RAY TRACING

Ray Tracing is a new technology which gives a whole new level of detailing, modelling, light sampling and light tracing to developers for making the games, softwares, graphics, etc. Ray tracing calculates the color of pixels by tracing the path that light would take if it were to travel from the eye of the viewer through the virtual 3D scene. As it traverses the scene, the light may reflect from one object to another (causing reflections), be blocked by objects (causing shadows), or pass through transparent or semi-transparent objects (causing refractions). All of these interactions are combined to produce the final color of a pixel that then displayed on the screen.

Users will have an options to ENABLE/DISABLE the Ray Tracing technology in the games' Graphics Settings (or Video Settings, depending on the game).

For example, in the above image (screenshot from Battlefield V), see the reflections coming off the car's door. Had the Ray Tracing option been disabled, the user would have seen just some flame-like yellowish orange marks on the car's doors. But now, the flame is treated as an actual light source and the light rays coming from it are being traced in the background, their path, their intensity, their reflecting corners, etc is being calculated and then the final color of the pixel is decided; the result of which, is in front of you!

The above image shows how the car door looks if the Ray Tracing option is turned off.

The Ray Tracing is a really amazing technology and can do wonders if implemented correctly! But it comes with its own set of drawbacks. The main drawback is that it is VERY much hardware intensive. Ray Tracing needs a dedicated hardware which is present only in RTX series cards. This means that the previous generation GTX series cards cannot make use of this technology! (Yes, even GTX 1080 Ti cannot!). Another issue is that it requires a lot of time for development. In this new era of gaming, developers releasing new games on a yearly cycle, it is difficult for developers to code so much; plus the audience which will make use of it is also very less (since the RTX cards are quite a bit costly).

GDDR6

GDDR6, an abbreviation for graphics double data rate type six synchronous dynamic random-access memory, is a type of synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high bandwidth ("double data rate") interface designed for use in graphics cards, game consoles, and high-performance computation.

High Performance or Heavily Loaded Workstations make use of Quadro Series of NVIDIA's GPUs. Hence, such demanding tasks require hefty amounts of VRAM. But fear not, because the RTX series (Quadro RTX to be specific) supports upto 48 GB of GDDR6 RAM! That's equal to 4 GTX 1080 Ti's put together using SLI technology!

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The NVIDIA NGX SDK is a new deep learning powered technology stack bringing AI-based features that accelerate and enhance graphics, photos imaging and video processing directly into applications. NVIDIA NGX features utilize Tensor Cores to maximize the efficiency of their operation, and require an RTX-capable GPU. NGX makes it easy for developers to integrate AI features into their application with pre-trained networks.

The above screenshot comes straight from the development lab of NVIDIA. It shows a sample of how Artificial Intelligence will help the GPU to pre-load the shadows and textures even before the use or the object of interest (the car here) reaches the specific location! Plus, use Ray Tracing to determine how the particular pixel will look when the light source rotates with the screen, how the textures will reflect, etc!

Turing Architecture

There is SO much to talk about this topic! But explaining everything about Turing will make another article as we will have to see the previous Pascal and Maxwell Architectures of these GPUs. So let us keep TURING for some other day!