When I think back about how far this stuff has come in my lifetime - and I'm not even really that old - I realise that, actually, in a lot of ways PC gaming has never been this good. Give it a couple of years or so and hardware accelerated ray-tracing may well be just another part of modern GPU design, much like hardware accelerated T&L was back in the day. Much like hardware T&L wasn't necessary if you had a very fast CPU to compensate, hardware-assisted ray-tracing isn't necessary now if your current graphics card can push sufficiently high resolutions and framerates that you don't miss the extra ray-tracing effects. 1 to show frame rate on screen constantly, 0 to turn it off. Make sure you press 'Enter' after you type each code in Effect. Hardware assisted ray-tracing is only supported on one GPU range right now, but others are round the corner. Press (,Ctrl, and Alt) to bring up the game console during play and enter the following codes to activate them. (Side note: the addition of a hardware transform and lighting engine into the GeForce 256 is what prompted Nvidia to stop calling their graphics chipsets "accelerators" and start calling them "graphics processing units": the entire 3D rendering pipeline was contained in one architecture and didn't rely on any outside components.) DirectX 7 eventually came along with hardware T&L support and within a couple of years hardware T&L units were standard in all discrete 3D graphics cards. If you adjust for inflation that comes to about $430 in today's USD - for comparison the cheapest RTX 2060 card I see on Scan is £300, $380 in funnymoney. Theyre bringing it back with a whopping FIVE dollar price drop. From what I can see, the first graphics card to support hardware T&L was the GeForce 256, and one of those cards with DDR memory would set you back $280 at the time (see this old Tom's Hardware review). Quake 2 is on a separate disc from Quake 4. Hardware T&L was in a similar situation when it first launched: at first it was only supported under OpenGL and only a handful of titles actually made use of it. The different fps values that people are talking. Quake RXT doesnt look 'miraculous' to you because you dont know what youre looking at. A sustained frame rate of 25-30 fps would actually do, it may never ever drop below 25 though, because that would cause game play restrictions. With an RTX 2080 Ti 4K, I got barely 30-35FPS in a twenty-year-old game. Well, technically you can run them on the GTX cards as well, but the performance is going to be horrendous. however I'm reminded of the days when hardware accelerated transform & lighting (T&L) was a brand new thing, way back in late 1999/early 2000. You can get to run at higher frame rate at cost of resolution. NVIDIA recently released the Quake 2 RTX edition exclusively for the GeForce RTX Turing cards. I'd like to dismiss hardware accelerated ray-tracing as a gimmick with little real-world value.
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