Nvidia’s new Turing RTX 2080 graphics cards have been the talk of this year’s Gamescom for hardware nuts, and with good reason. While their jump in raw performance is still a little vague, the new techie bits they’re ushering in such as Nvidia’s fancy ray tracing light gubbins (which makes shadows and reflections look extra pretty and realistic) and their clever, speed-boosting deep learning super sampling (which uses AI to produce equally sharp, smooth edges as traditional anti-aliasing tech) are really quite impressive.
There’s a lot more I can’t tell you about just yet, but one man who can is 4A Games’ rendering programmer Ben Archard, who I sat down with earlier this week to chat about all things RTX in upcoming post-apocalyptic, train adventure Metro Exodus. We talked about everything from 4A’s RTX performance targets to how it could potentially change the course of game development as we know it.