It’s ON! Putting Next Gen in the Hands of Tens of Millions of Gamers

by Jeff Fisher

Gaming is thriving. An entire generation is growing up gaming. Two billion gamers and counting. They play at home, on the go and on multiple platforms, and by far the most vibrant, innovative and open is the PC.

The forces driving PC gaming are staggering in scale.

Take the battle royale genre — think Fortnite, Call of Duty Blackout and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. It’s had a meteoric rise from zero to a player base of 300 million across platforms in just two years, bringing many new players to PC gaming and GeForce.

Consider the unstoppable rise of esports. It’s the fastest growing spectator sport and is on track to amass close to 600 million fans by 2020. That’s 2x in just three years. Worldwide prize money exceeded $150 million, also 2x in three years. Performance and fast response (frames per second and latency, respectively) are the top considerations for esports gamers, making GeForce the preferred GPU for top tournaments and pro gamers.

Gaming has become the new mass medium. More than 750 million people are watching gaming live streams and videos on outlets like YouTube and Twitch.tv. In fact, Twitch made news last year by surpassing CNN for monthly viewers. Within our GeForce community, we’ve seen games capture and sharing explode with 2 billion captures using GeForce Experience last year.

And PC gamers are the most demanding. Developers continue to produce more visually rich games. Over the past five years, the GPU performance required to play the latest games at 1080p, 60 FPS has increased 3x. And the most desired gaming monitors have doubled in resolution. The motivation for the installed base of gamers to upgrade is real — gamers choosing higher-end GPUs have increased 2.5x since 2013.

Along Comes GeForce RTX

At CES we announced we’re bringing our revolutionary Turing technology to tens of millions of gamers with the new GeForce RTX 2060, priced at just $349, along with impossibly sleek new Max-Q laptops to drive today’s fastest growing gaming platform.

GeForce RTX 2060 Delivers Performance … and Much More

The RTX 2060 delivers the performance and value for the “sweet spot” of GeForce gaming. The GeForce RTX 2060 follows a line of the most popular GPUs on Steam: GeForce GTX 960, 970 and 1060. This class of GPU represents one-third of our gaming installed base. With Turing’s advanced streaming multiprocessors, the RTX 2060 delivers up to 2x the performance of the GTX 1060 on today’s games.

But Turing is much more than raw performance. It represents the biggest architectural leap forward in over a decade. With a new hybrid rendering approach, Turing fuses rasterization, real-time ray tracing and AI for incredible realism in PC games. GeForce RTX paves the way for the future of PC gaming.

Gaming Ecosystem Already Onboard

The gaming industry has come together to start delivering the future of PC gaming.

Microsoft released an extension to DirectX called DirectX Raytracing (DXR) last November, laying the foundation for accelerated ray tracing and giving developers access to the capabilities of the RTX GPUs.

And the leading game engines — Epic’s Unreal Engine, Unity, EA’s Frostbite and more — are delivering seamless access to accelerated ray tracing to thousands of developers, ensuring a future of breathtakingly realistic games.

Ray Tracing Meets AI

GeForce RTX uses Turing’s 52 teraflops of Tensor Core performance to enable Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). DLSS starts with a given resolution and uses a trained AI network to construct high-quality, higher resolution gameplay. The result is a clear, crisp image with up to 50 percent higher performance.

Real-Time Ray Tracing + DLSS = RTX On!

At CES, we announced DLSS will be coming to Battlefield V. While it has been noted that the beauty of ray tracing can come at the cost of some performance, this is overcome with the integration of DLSS. With the addition of DLSS,  Battlefield V is able to run “RTX ON” (ray tracing + DLSS)  and maintain the same frame rate as non-ray tracing (RTX OFF) at 1440p on an RTX 2060.

We also announced DLSS is coming to blockbuster BioWare (EA) title Anthem, which releases in February. And there are dozens of other current and upcoming titles in the pipeline.

Leaner, Meaner, Greener: RTX Brings Big Performance to Sleek Laptops

Demand for gaming laptops has grown dramatically in recent years, driven by their transformation from a compromised platform to a full gaming experience, thanks to Pascal — and now Turing — GPUs and NVIDIA’s Max-Q laptop design approach.

Gaming laptops are the fastest-growing gaming platform, and GeForce gaming laptops sales have grown 10x in five years. A key driver: Max-Q, an innovative approach to crafting the world’s thinnest, fastest, quietest gaming laptops.

Max-Q has enabled a new class of GeForce gaming laptops with impossibly sleek designs, thinner than 20 mm, narrow bezels, 144-Hz displays and extended battery life. Seventeen Max-Q laptops have already been announced this year, more than double last year’s total. And overall a record 40+ new RTX models in more than 100 configurations start shipping Jan. 29 from the world’s top OEMs.

RTX Is for Creators

GeForce RTX desktops and laptops are great news not just for gamers but for the world’s creator community, whose numbers exceed 20 million. Whether you create complex 3D animations or edit high-resolution videos, you’ll be able to experience a new level of productivity on GeForce RTX.

This week at CES, we announced collaborations with Autodesk and RED for 3D animation and 8K video editing. We also demonstrated how we’re bringing hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AI-enhanced graphics and advanced video processing to our new thin and light GeForce RTX Max-Q laptops.

We also announced a major upgrade to OBS, the standard tool for game broadcasters. With GeForce RTX, any game stream can achieve pro quality from a single gaming rig, or even broadcast on the go from thin and light RTX Max-Q laptops.

Finally, we announced we’re working with HTC to push the state of the art in virtual reality with foveated rendering using RTX GPUs and HTC’s new Vive Pro Eye headset.

RTX Is the Next Generation of Gaming — and It’s ON!

The RTX 2060, priced at just $349, together with a record 40+ RTX gaming laptops open up the next generation of PC gaming to tens of millions of gamers.

The next generation of gaming is here.