New A.I. Enhanced Nvidia Graphics Cards

Anyone remotely interested in 3d rendering, video editing or of course, gaming, knows for certain the significance of Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), also called VRAM (Video Random Access Memory) and most commonly called graphic card. Graphic cards developed by Intel once used to be the only one known to the common user; but a few years ago, Nvidia took the market by storm with their GPU’s that were far more powerful and extremely heat and cost effective. Nvidia is currently the leading developers of Graphic cards and have been for over two decades.

Nvidia has updated their Graphic cards periodically with very predictable upgrades in processing power and heat effectiveness with occasional innovative solutions like VSync and GSync technologies that improve the quality of animations displayed on a computer monitor.

Their updates are highly anticipated by gamers, producers, critics and competitors alike every single year. Like always, it was expected of Nvidia to dish out their new series of graphic cards in 2018 with the usual update in power and efficiency; but this time, Nvidia presented something far more innovative. They introduced new GPU’s called the Gefore RTX 2000 series that improved their performance using Artificial Intelligence and “Ray Tracing” technology which is an almost alien terminology to the gaming community, just introduced by Nvidia.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that results in real-time light reflections and cinematic effects that can make games look a lot more like movies. Ray tracing is something PC gamers have been promised for years, and it has long been considered the “holy grail” of video games. Nvidia is now aiming to bring it in real time to the masses.

Essentially, an algorithm can trace the path of light, and then simulate the way that the light interacts with the virtual objects it ultimately hits in the computer-generated world.

We’ve seen in-game lighting effects become more and more realistic over the years, but the benefits of ray tracing are less about the light itself and more about how it interacts with the world.

Nvidia demonstrated the performance of their new graphic cards on new AAA titles of video games and it can be said with certainty that they did deliver. The ray-tracing demonstrations were impressive, but most were limited to physically modeled materials, and reflections and lighting indoors. It’s the real-world game support that matters, and Nvidia is promising real-time ray tracing in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, and performance gains in lighting and other effects in Battlefield V and Metro Exodus. The demonstration of Tomb Raider was particularly impressive, with realistic shadows and lighting shown in nighttime scenarios.

The performance and ray-tracing support on the new RTX 2000 series is all thanks to it being based on Nvidia’s latest Turing architecture. “This is a new computing model, so there’s a new way to think about performance,” says Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “This new Turing processor is just a monster, it’s incredible.” Nvidia is now measuring its ray-tracing performance as a key target for these new cards. Huang showed off a number of demonstrations of existing cards and new rendering techniques with the RTX series.

Seeing the introduction of technologies unknown to live playbacks like videogames by Nvidia, we can only anticipate more and more in the future; perhaps it will take less than a decade to innovate rendering to the point that it becomes completely indistinguishable from reality.