The State of Nvidia RTX Ray Tracing: One Year Later

Time to revisit the state of ray tracing. It's been months since we last discussed ray tracing in detail, when we tested it on early titles such as Battlefield V, and the latest releases of Metro and Tomb Raider, so there's plenty of fresh stuff to go over, more benchmarks, more experience playing those games and quite a few opinions. This is bound to be a long one, so strap yourselves in.

We'll do a recap of the entire first year of Nvidia's ray tracing efforts. A look at the games that came out with RTX support, the games that didn't, and just how the ecosystem has evolved in the space of twelve months. Has performance improved? Have some of the visual issues been sorted out? Has Nvidia delivered on their launch day promises?

Starting from the beginning, Nvidia released the first consumer GPU with hardware accelerated ray tracing on September 20, 2018 in the GeForce RTX 2080. That was quickly followed by the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2070 and then in January 2019, the RTX 2060. Fast forward until July, we've had even more RTX GPUs hit the market with the Super line-up, so there's no shortage of RTX products available at a range of price points from $350 and above.