On August 20, 2018, NVIDIA will be able to bring cinema-quality visuals to life in games. With revolutionary hardware and software support announced the first GeForce RTX graphics cards.

The feature that makes this feature possible are real-time graphics cards, which also changed the name of the graphics cards from GTX to RTX. It was ray tracing technology and according to NVIDIA CEO Huang, computer graphics had been reinvented.

The journey started difficult

It’s an undeniable fact that the path to realistic graphics is through the addition of real-time ray tracing technology to games. However, NVIDIA had a hard time convincing its users of this in the early days when RTX was released. Like any technology that ages, when RTX graphics cards are released, games that support real-time ray tracing will be the ones NVIDIA showed off at the launch event. Battlefield V and Shadow of the Tomb RaiderIt consisted of.

GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which was expected to exceed the 4K 60FPS limit under the conditions of the day, was released with the ray tracing feature enabled. It could only achieve 60 FPS at 1080p resolution. In addition, the ray tracing feature, which was used only in reflections in Battlefield V and only in shadows in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, did not make a serious difference to the images according to most users, but only reduced performance.

NVIDIA’s solution to the performance drop was DLSS technology. DLSS, an artificial intelligence-based scaling technology According to NVIDIA, it would cover the performance burden of ray tracing without suffering a major loss in image quality.

However, because the artificial intelligence algorithm used in the first version of DLSS had to be trained on each game separately, the number of games that supported DLSS was limited to the fingers of one hand in the first year after the release of RTX. RTX platform a difficult adjustment process was waiting.

Released in 2019 control game It was the game that made the most detailed use of ray tracing to date and provided the first clues as to what effect ray tracing could have on game graphics.

Compared to previous examples, ray tracing is used to calculate shadows, reflections and lighting of the game world, compared to ray tracing disabled. much more realistic graphics was providing.

Performance issues started to be resolved with DLSS 2.0

The biggest development that made RTX technologies so popular among gamers today happened in April 2020 NVIDIA has announced version 2.0 of DLSS. DLSS 2.0, which contains many innovations compared to the first version, has shown an incomparable improvement in image quality and performance improvement.

DLSS 2.0, released with Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood, did not deteriorate the image quality at all, unlike the previous version, and increased the visual quality when used in quality mode, but most importantly it provided an improvement in gaming performance that was still never seen before.

• Ray Tracing Performance Table in Control DLSS Quality Mode: About 1.5 years after the launch of the NVIDIA RTX platform, it has significantly improved ray tracing performance with DLSS.

Another development on the DLSS side was the way it was integrated into games. With version 2.0, the artificial intelligence algorithm underlying DLSS is now available There was no need to train for each match separately and a single artificial intelligence model could be used across all games. This way it became much easier to add RTX technologies, whether ray tracing or DLSS, to games.

With the launch of the RTX 30 series, it is in its second generation. RTX technologies have taken off. Many modern games were now being released with ray tracing and DLSS technology.

Hardware-accelerated ray tracing support for consoles and AMD graphics cards is another step taken by NVIDIA in 2018. What a big role it plays in the field of gaming technologies It turned out to.

Shortly before the RTX 40 series was announced, NVIDIA announced that the number of games and applications supporting DLSS exceeded 200. The technology, which could not be included in 5 games the first year, has taken on a revolutionary character with the 2nd version. In two years it grew like an avalanche. and was featured in almost all modern games, especially Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.

The performance improvement reached record levels with the RTX 40 series

With the RTX 40 series, DLSS has once again gone a step further and this time from NVIDIA square display technology announced. In this way, in addition to the upscaling function, artificial intelligence also created frames and increased the performance improvement from the 1.5 – 2 times we are used to with DLSS 2.0 to 3.5 – 4 times. Additionally, the processor bottleneck that DLSS sometimes encountered was no longer a factor, as frame rendering was performed only on the graphics card.

• With DLSS 3, 7 of the 8 pixels players saw on screen were now created by artificial intelligence.

As DLSS technology advanced, so did the level of ray tracing used in games. Released in 2020 Cyberpunk 2077It was one of the games that made the most effective use of ray tracing to date.

CDProject Red, together with NVIDIA, has announced the full ray tracing mode for Cyberpunk 2077, with an update in April 2023. Ray tracing overdrive met users under the name. While there were minor shortcomings, a modern AAA game now had a mode rendered solely using ray tracing.

• Differences between standard ray tracing and Overdrive mode. On the right, the light from the light source fills the environment in a much more realistic way. Source: Digital Foundry

NVIDIA was unhappy with the arrival of Overdrive mode to Cyberpunk and used ray tracing. image problems caused by the difficulty of noise removal algorithms To solve this problem, it introduced DLSS 3.5 and Beam Forming features to users in September 2023 with the Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 update.

Completing its evolution, DLSS no longer only provided better performance, but also objectively improved image quality. Full ray tracing and DLSS 3.5, which soon appeared in Alan Wake 2, made it known to many users as the best graphics ever in the mysterious world created by Remedy.

• From left to right: DLSS off / DLSS 2 Super resolution on / DLSS 3 Super resolution and framing on / DLSS 3.5 Super resolution, framing and beaming on

The RTX platform, which could barely deliver 1080p 60FPS values ​​when it first hit the market even with basic ray tracing features, is A visual feast that is truly difficult to distinguish. It can exceed 100 FPS at 4K resolution with graphics that can be described as .

During this five-year period, we have witnessed an increase in the number of games and applications supporting NVIDIA’s RTX technologies day by day. The progress NVIDIA has made in its mission to bring gaming graphics to the most realistic and performance levels is truly impressive. In 2018 and earlier real-time ray tracing It was a dream for many.

Today, RTX technologies that play a role in making this dream come true are fully developed. 500 games and applications It’s laying down. At this point we have to tip our hats to what NVIDIA has done.

We look forward to seeing how ray tracing and DLSS will develop further. At this point, we hope that competitors won’t fall behind and let NVIDIA have a monopoly on advanced graphics technologies. However, if you really want to experience top-level graphics in the vast majority of games on the market, NVIDIA seems like the only go-to.