Nvidia’s official figures show that it is now on the precipice of being able to boast that 400 RTX-enabled apps and games are available. Nvidia introduced the gaming world to RTX with the first Turing architecture GPUs in September 2018.
If you check out the table here (updated Feb 23, 2023), you can count 398 applications and games offering RTX technology enhancements. The software titles range from 10bit FX Notch Builder (app) to Yag (game) – with plenty of more notable and memorable titles in between.
When RTX technology debuted, it didn’t receive a warm welcome from tech reviewers or the PC gaming community. RTX titles were initially scarce, and seeing the benefits sometimes required gamers to capture stills and pixel-peep. Lastly, the RTX 20 series were the first to be affected by the cryptomining craze, inflating prices and making availability scarce. These factors lead to RTX technologies not exerting a big pull on gamers/creators and are evidenced by how graphics card popularity charts have largely skipped from being dominated by GeForce GTX 10 and GTX 16 cards to RTX 30 cards.
In recent years and with the era of the RTX 30 (Ampere) graphics cards established, RTX technologies like real-time raytracing, DLSS 2+, and AI acceleration have permeated deeply. In addition, Nvidia has partnered with leading game engine makers to ensure that new AAA titles have raytracing and DLSS from day one.
Looking through the table data, we see the apps to games balance is 114 to 254 as of last week. Pondering over the apps, the well-known Adobe suite primarily uses AI acceleration with Nvidia RTX hardware. However, the RTX real-time raytracing functionality is also widely used by applications from several vendors that focus on 3D modeling and visualization work. In the long games list, there seems to be a trend of older game remasters and reissues getting RTX technologies baked in as part of the process.
Nvidia’s latest RTX technologies are slightly controversial. For example, the new DLSS 3 is only supported on the latest RTX 40 (Ada Lovelace) GPUs. More recently, Nvidia Video Super Resolution made its debut, requiring at least RTX 30 series GPUs for support – and there is no apparent reason why RTX 20 cards can’t be used for this feature. In summary, these RTX technologies are welcome and interesting to see. Still, the PC community would prefer open standards, and artificial barriers that may be imposed to spur upgrades are unwelcome.
