It's been over five years since Nvidia launched it's RTX 20-series GPUs back in 2018. There were a lot of promises made, about how ray tracing would become the next big thing for graphics. Also announced at the same times was DLSS, Deep Learning Super Sampling, an AI-trained upscaling solution that was supposed to make RT possible at decent levels of performance. Fast forward to today, and many of the best graphics cards are indeed Nvidia RTX models — just two generations on from the original, with a lot of other changes for good measure. Not only has the hardware changed, but Nvidia has now surpassed the 500 DLSS and RTX games and applications milestone.
You can see the full list — updated regularly — of all the RTX-enabled games and applications over at Nvidia. At present, there are 388 games that make use of one of the RTX features: DLSS, ray tracing, or AI. There are also 119 applications listed, so if you only care about games, Nvidia still has a long way to go before it reaches the 500 mark. There are some other interesting bits of information.
So far, only eight games have reached the holy grail of offering full ray tracing support, and two of those are basically duplicates — Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty are effectively the same listing, as are Portal RTX and Portal: Prelude RTX. Not coincidentally, three of those games (two if you don't give Phantom Liberty a second tally) are the only DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction offerings so far.
By far the most abundant category is for DLSS 2 upscaling support: 375 total games and apps support the feature, of which 361 are games. Many of these also feature ray tracing support, but that number in total still only stands at 138 games and 72 applications. Also telling is that only five games had DLSS 1 support (technically there were more, but several of them were later upgraded to DLSS 2).
What about anti-aliasing without upscaling? That was originally discussed clear back in 2018, but the official feature — DLAA, or Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing — didn't show up until 2021 with The Elder Scrolls Online. There are currently 41 games with DLAA support.
Nvidia's latest AI technology is DLSS 3 Frame Generation, which requires an RTX 40-series GPU. It uses the enhanced Optical Flow Accelerator (OFA) that's part of all Ada Lovelace GPUs to run the AI workloads that generate a new frame from two fully rendered frames. It ends up being more of a frame smoothing technique, as it adds latency, but there are now 65 games and apps (four of which are apps) that support DLSS 3.
Considering we now see thousands of new games released in a year, 500+ RTX-enabled games and apps might not seem like a lot. However, we've noticed a marked increase in the number of major releases that now support one or more RTX features. It took some time, but we're finally getting to the point where ray tracing, upscaling, and even frame generation are becoming standard fare for a lot of releases.
There's also plenty of buzz about the future potential for AI to continue to enhance games. We've only really seen AI used for upscaling and image quality improvements so far, but there's a lot of experimenting going on with using AI to allow real-time generated conversations and even quests in games. And hey, maybe EA will soon allow you to play yourself (badly, we presume) in future games.
Outside of games, AI has caused a major change in content creation in just the past year or so, with Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, speech recognition, video generation, and more. Certainly, there are concerns about what's happening in the realm of AI, and the U.S. government is working hard to limit China's access to the fastest AI hardware with its latest export restrictions — which have also extended to blocking the RTX 4090 from export to China (only about a year too late on that one).
I remember thinking back when the RTX 20-series was first revealed that the Tensor cores that were part of the new hardware might prove more important over time than the ray tracing technologies. Given everything happening right now, I'm more convinced than ever that AI will ultimately trump ray tracing in terms of usefulness. Opinions will vary, but even now, I generally find a good DLSS 2 upscaling implementation to be more important in games than ray tracing or path tracing.
So, congratulations on five years and 500 RTX-enabled games and apps, Nvidia. It's been a bit of a bumpy road at times, and the RTX 20-series certainly hasn't held up as well as some would have liked (at least with full ray tracing), but it paved the way for future architectures that are opening the door to new experiences. I can't wait to see where we are in another five years.
