NVIDIA made real-time ray tracing a reality with the invention of Ray Tracing Cores (RT Cores), dedicated processing cores on the GPU specifically designed to tackle performance-intensive ray tracing workloads.
Ada’s third-generation RT Cores have twice the ray-triangle intersection throughput, increasing RT-TFLOP performance by over 2x.
The new RT Cores also include a new Opacity Micromap (OMM) Engine and a new Displaced Micro-Mesh (DMM) Engine. The OMM Engine enables much faster ray tracing of alpha-tested textures often used for foliage, particles, and fences. The DMM Engine delivers up to 10X faster Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) build time with up to 20X less BVH storage space, enabling real-time ray tracing of geometrically complex scenes.