What Is RTX? The Power of Ray Tracing in Modern Gaming Explained

What Is RTX and Ray Tracing?

Ray tracing is a rendering technology that simulates the behavior of light and shadows within a virtual scene to achieve photorealistic visuals. In video games, traditional rasterization creates images from individual triangles and tries to approximate lighting using tricks like SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion). Ray tracing, on the other hand, sends "virtual rays" from the camera into the scene, checking their intersections with objects and light sources. This allows for more accurate lighting, reflections, and shadows: light genuinely "spreads" throughout the scene, creating soft shadows, highlights, and reflections-not just painted effects.

How Ray Tracing Works

With ray tracing, one or more rays are cast from the virtual camera (the player's eye) for each pixel in the scene. If a ray hits an object, its properties (color, material, normal) at the intersection point are calculated. From there, secondary rays can be generated towards light sources (for shadow calculations) and reflective surfaces (for reflections). Unlike rasterization, where lighting and shadows are simulated with various techniques, ray tracing physically determines how light interacts with surfaces-whether it reflects, refracts, or scatters. This approach brings visuals closer to reality but is much more computationally intensive than simply rendering triangles.

What Is NVIDIA RTX?

RTX (Ray Tracing eXtreme) is NVIDIA's brand for hardware-accelerated ray tracing technology. The first NVIDIA graphics cards with RTX support, based on the Turing architecture (GeForce RTX 20 series), were launched in late summer 2018 and went on sale in September of that year. These GPUs introduced new hardware blocks-RT cores to accelerate ray-scene intersection calculations and tensor cores for AI tasks (such as DLSS). NVIDIA and Microsoft jointly developed the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, allowing PC games to harness RTX cores for real-time effects. As a result, graphics became more dynamic: scenes react to changing lighting and time of day, while reflections and shadows update in real time-no pre-baked effects required.

Rasterization vs Ray Tracing (SSAO)

Before the RTX era, nearly all 3D games relied on rasterization-a fast, hardware-based process that projects polygons onto the screen. Objects are broken into triangles, which are rendered using a Z-buffer for correct layering. Lighting effects are added via shaders and extra passes: for instance, SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) simulates global shading in scene corners but only uses the already-rendered image. SSAO "darkens" corners and crevices, offering only a rough shading approximation. Ray tracing physically calculates lighting: it considers all light sources, surface colors, and multiple reflections. With SSAO, a corner shadow is just a darkened area, while with ray tracing, the light's real path into the corner is simulated. RTX effects thus produce more realistic visuals, including color bleeding (surface color influences reflected light), soft shadows from different light shapes, and accurate glossy and matte reflections.

Examples of Games with RTX Support

RTX ray tracing is increasingly common in modern games. Among the first titles with realistic ray tracing were Metro Exodus (2019, global illumination) and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018, shadows). By late 2019, games like Battlefield V (realistic water and metal reflections) and Control (focus on shadows and indoor reflections) had adopted the technology. The most famous example is Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), the first game to fully utilize ray tracing for all major effects. In Cyberpunk 2077, RTX delivers global and diffuse lighting, both glossy and matte reflections, as well as precise shadows and light flares. More recently, Watch Dogs: Legion and the remastered Shadow of the Tomb Raider added RTX modes in 2021-2022, bringing beautiful reflections and shadows. The table below highlights popular games and their RTX effects:

Advantages of RTX

RTX ray tracing offers several graphical benefits. Most notably, it increases scene realism: objects appear more three-dimensional thanks to natural shadows and highlights, reflections in water and glass are precise, and even matte surfaces can display subtle glints (barely noticeable with rasterization). Metallic details look genuinely shiny, light from flashlights and neon signs bends around obstacles, illuminating areas realistically. In Control, ray tracing literally "brings interiors to life"-highlights appear on walls and furniture where only flat color existed before. In Minecraft RTX, sunlight streams through windows to light distant objects, with even interior spaces receiving indirect light-something impossible with traditional techniques. The result is richer, more vibrant scenes, with the effect of directional volumetric lighting and color influence from one surface to another.

Graphics Card Requirements and Performance

The main drawback of RTX is the significant drop in performance. Real ray tracing is computationally intensive and typically requires high-end RTX graphics cards (20, 30 series, or newer) for smooth gameplay. For example, in Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled on ultra settings (2560×1440, RTX + DLSS Quality), even a GeForce RTX 3070 or 2080 Ti barely maintains ~50 FPS, whereas without RTX or at lower settings, 60+ FPS is easily achievable. In Control with RTX but no DLSS at high quality, an RTX 2080 Ti can dip below 24 FPS at 4K, but enabling DLSS can boost performance by up to ~80%, bringing the game closer to 60 FPS. A powerful CPU and sufficient RAM are also recommended. Some RTX effects can be emulated on older GTX cards using software tools (DXR), but this further reduces FPS, making true ray tracing best suited for cards with dedicated RT cores. Typically, players balance RTX with DLSS (AI-powered upscaling) to maximize frame rates with minimal quality loss.

The History of RTX and Ray Tracing in Games

The concept of ray tracing originated in the 1960s-70s and was long used in film and animation for photorealistic rendering. Real-time ray tracing entered gaming only with NVIDIA RTX: in 2018, the Turing architecture (GeForce RTX 20 series with RT cores) debuted at Gamescom. Initially, RT shader support appeared in beta drivers for Pascal and Turing-based cards (GeForce 10 and 16 series), but lacking dedicated cores, performance suffered. The first major gaming examples appeared in 2019: Battlefield V was among the pioneers with real-time reflections, Metro Exodus featured global illumination, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider introduced ray-traced shadows. The revolutionary Cyberpunk 2077 launched in 2020 with a full suite of RTX effects. Subsequently, titles like Minecraft RTX (which received a dedicated RTX version) and many Unreal Engine 4/5 projects rapidly adopted DXR and RTX (including Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite, Watch Dogs Legion, and more). With new GPU generations (Ampere architecture-GeForce RTX 30, 2020; then Ada Lovelace-RTX 40, 2022), ray tracing performance soared. Competition from AMD increased as well: starting with RDNA2 architecture (Radeon RX 6000, 2020), their cards gained ray tracing acceleration. Today, ray tracing is considered a key technology in game graphics, gradually replacing older rendering techniques in high-quality titles.

Conclusion

RTX represents a set of advanced NVIDIA technologies for accelerating ray tracing in games and applications, making imagery more realistic with physically accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections. Compared to classic rasterization and SSAO, the result is far more convincing-though it demands powerful hardware. Popular RTX-enabled games include Cyberpunk 2077, Minecraft RTX, Control, and many others where the technology's impact is especially noticeable. RTX delivers a striking visual "wow factor" and is quickly becoming the new standard for graphics settings in modern AAA titles.