Special hardware units handle ray traversal, freeing up the GPU shaders. While video game consoles have finally reached the age of ray tracing, performing those graphical calculations in real time can ...

This article is part of the Electronics History series: The Graphics Chip Chronicles. In early 2018, NVIDIA showcased hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing using its DGX system and the DXR API.

Over the last few years, if you're a gamer or PC hardware enthusiast, you've probably heard the term "ray-tracing" bandied about quite a bit. Actually, you likely heard it before that, but with the ...