In four years, we’ve gone from PC owners able to play a path-traced version of Quake 2 through to the same techniques applied to Cyberpunk 2077 – one of the most demanding triple-A games around. Even today, Quake 2 RTX continues to be a challenging piece of software to run – but anything from an RTX 4070 to the top-end RTX 4090 can deliver those cutting-edge visuals at 60 frames per second or higher. The question is, how?
There’s no simple answer here as we’re looking at a range of technological innovations in terms of both software and hardware, and it’s on the latter point where we can begin to get to the bottom of the issue. Quake 2 RTX launched in June 2019 when the most powerful GPU on the market was the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. It managed to run the game rather well at around 1080p, capable of 60fps with room to spare. However, turn up the resolution to a higher standard like 4K and frame-rates operate in the upper teens to the early 20s.
Four years later, the latest GPUs are powering through those RT calculations – an RTX 4090 runs the same workload around four times faster – though before we go into how ray tracing hardware performance has improved so dramatically, I’m going to stress that this is only part of the story. Developers are working hard to increase efficiency on the software side too.
The story has to begin somewhere though and the advances in the latest graphics hardware are impressive. The RTX 4090’s 4x performance gain over the RTX 2080 Ti comes from a number of sources in the hardware: more shader cores and a higher operating frequency of course, but some of it is architectural as well. For example, each new Nvidia architecture has respectively doubled the triangle intersection testing throughput in the RT core. So, the Ampere architecture in the 30-series cards can tests twice the amount of triangles in the same time as the 20-series Turing offerings.