What Are RT Cores? Nvidia Raytracing Cores

Last updated on August 16th, 2023 at 08:21 pm

The new RTX GPUs by Nvidia are equipped with the latest ray-tracing technologies, that allow for fantastic visuals, and have a more realistic effect on graphics.

In order to accomplish this Nvidia had to create some new hardware called RT cores (Ray-tracing Cores).

These cores allow games’ ray tracing capabilities to be taken to the next level, allowing for stunning visuals and realism.

So, how do these RT cores work? How do they affect ray tracing, and what’s the difference between them and other GPU cores?

These are all questions that you might have and we are here to answer them.

How Do RT Cores Work?

NVIDIA’s RTX family of graphics cards has a new type of hardware known as RT cores or Ray Tracing cores. These cores are intended to speed up ray tracing, a rendering method used in computer graphics to produce realistic lighting and shadow effects.

Ray tracing simulates how light beams behave when they come into contact with various things in a virtual world. This is a computationally demanding operation, but RT cores are created specifically to execute the calculations significantly more quickly than conventional rendering techniques such as using CUDA cores. (But we will get into that a little later.)

NVIDIA’s RTX graphics cards are ideally suited for usage in video games and other real-time applications that need high-quality graphics because they have RT cores, which enable them to create highly realistic lighting and shadows in real-time.

It’s worth noting that not all NVIDIA graphics cards have RT cores. These cores were first introduced with the RTX 20 series and have since been included in the RTX 30 series as well.

What Is Ray Tracing?

RT cores are the reason why ray tracing exists.

So, what is ray tracing?

Ray tracing is a technique used in video games to simulate how light moves across space, interacts with various objects, and eventually enters your eyes on the screen.

Light reflects off objects, passes through them, bends, and occasionally is absorbed. In order to produce a picture that appears more lifelike, ray tracing attempts to recreate all of these interactions, which can be very GPU intensive.

How Are RT Cores Different From CUDA Cores?

RT cores and CUDA cores are both hardware that is essential to the performance of modern Nvidia graphics cards.

Both CUDA and RT are essential to improving your graphics card performance and visuals when gaming.

To start off I should give a brief definition of what these two cores do.

What are Cuda Cores?

CUDA stands for (Compute Unified Device Architecture). These are specialized processing units that allow your GPU to handle almost any computing task. They are able to perform a large number of calculations in a short amount of time which makes them ideal for generating graphics and improving the FPS on your screen.

CUDA cores can be used in a wide range of applications, such as scientific simulations, machine learning, and image processing, to accelerate computations and improve performance.

RT (ray tracing) cores, on the other hand, are used to specifically enhance the quality of ray tracing on your computer.

RT cores were made to only deal with this specific task which gives your CUDA cores more space and bandwidth to work on other performance and graphics-heavy tasks.

Ray tracing is a technique used in computer graphics to create realistic images by tracing the path of light as it bounces off objects in a scene. RT cores are able to perform ray-triangle intersection calculations at a much faster rate than traditional CUDA cores, which significantly speeds up the rendering process.