Earlier this year NVIDIA announced a new set of "RTX" features that included support for advanced ray tracing features, upgrading a graphics technique that simulates the way light works in the real world. It's expected to usher in a new generation of hyper-realistic graphics but there was one small problem: no one made any hardware to support the new stuff yet.

Now at the SIGGRAPH conference NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang revealed eighth-generation Turing GPU hardware that's actually capable of accelerating both ray tracing and AI. Turing can render ray tracing 25x faster than old Pascal technology thanks to dedicated processors that will do the math on how light and sound travel through 3D environments. They're also the first graphics cards announced with Samsung's new GDDR6 memory on board to move data faster using less power than ever before.