Nvidia recently launched a new series of graphics cards in the GTX family. A major selling point according to Nvidia is Raytracing. I am unable to understand what exactly ray tracing is. Is it just beneficial in gaming or does it have some use in productivity as well?
This is an interesting question. Nvidia has definitely pitched ray tracing as the big new feature in the new RTX lineup of graphics cards. Whether or not this feature is worth spending big chunks of money, well we’ll answer that in a bit.
First, let’s understand what is ray tracing. Basically, ray tracing is a technology that is used to simulate the physical behavior of light. What happens is, to decide the color of light in the scene, it traces that path that light would take if it were to travel from your eye into space.
What does this do? Ray tracing leads to more realistic lighting effects in games. Ray tracing has been long done for non-real time rendering. However, the new line up of GPUs from Nvidia are powerful enough to perform ray tracing in real time.
Is Raytracing worth paying a lot more? Well, practically, not many games support ray tracing as of now. Nvidia claims that many will soon. It is a fact that RTX2080Ti is the most powerful consumer grade GPU in the market. Go for it right away if it falls in your budget. As far as the RTX2080, 2070 and 2060 are concerned, they are just marginally better than the previous GTX 1000 series.
