From engine updates to exciting games to developer tools, NVIDIA and its partners are making a number of ray tracing announcements at GDC 2019 to drive the ecosystem forward around this exciting new technology.

For decades, NVIDIA has been working towards the dream of real-time videogame ray tracing. It required millions of hours of research and development, focusing on everything from GPU hardware and software, to updated APIs and game engines, to development tools and denoisers. In 2018, all that hard work came to fruition with the launch of GeForce RTX GPUs, the world’s first consumer graphics cards with dedicated RT Core ray tracing hardware, enabling realistic ray-traced effects to run in real-time in high-fidelity and at high resolutions.

In the time since, our software and developer teams have kept working, allowing us to optimize our ray tracing technology, make new software advancements, and help developers further accelerate ray tracing performance in games. Because of this work, we have dramatically sped up ray tracing performance for GeForce RTX GPUs, and can now enable DirectX Raytracing ( DXR ) on GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and higher graphics cards via a Game Ready Driver update, expected in April.

The much larger install base of RT-capable GPUs will fuel developer adoption of ray tracing technology, bringing more games for both GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX users to experience. GeForce GTX gamers will have an opportunity to use ray tracing at lower RT quality settings and resolutions, while GeForce RTX users will experience up to 2-3x faster performance thanks to the dedicated RT Cores on their GPUs, enabling the use of higher-quality settings and resolutions at higher framerates.