Wait, isn't this kind of a big deal?
I didn't know real time ray tracing was already feasible on non RTX cards.
I didn't know real time ray tracing was already feasible on non RTX cards.
More seriously, RTX adds custom acceleration hardware (fixed function hardware ray box and ray triangle intersection). Whether or not this hardware is required (or enough) for feasible mainstream adoption of real-time raytracing in commercial games is up in the air, but at the very least it turns making a performant, GPU accelerated, real-time raytracer from very hard and only usable in toy applications to relatively straightforward and almost usable in real applications. The RTX name is marketing but the hardware does add some value. As with anything once (if?) raytracer hardware is cheaper, more powerful and more ubiquitous it could have major effects on real-time rendering.
Saying it’s marketing is a little like saying your AMD ThreadRipper is just marketing and an ATMega328 is plenty feasible because the 20Mhz 8-bit processor can still compute anything.
The distinguishing feature of the RTX hardware is that it’s faster.
Not to discount that RTX is a big improvement - acutally it seems to be msotly deep learning based denoising that makes RTX possible.
But you would only compute like 1 000 rays per frame, while now you can compute like 10 000 000 rays per frame :)