Nvidia’s official numbers show that it’s now on the verge of boasting 400 RTX-capable apps and games. In September 2018, Nvidia introduced RTX to the gaming world with the first Turing architecture GPUs.
If you look at the table here (opens in a new tab) (updated on February 23, 2023) There are 398 apps and games that offer RTX technology improvements. Software ranges from 10-bit FX Notch Builder (app) to Yagi (game) – including plenty of notable and memorable titles.
When RTX technology debuted, it was not warmly received by technical experts or the PC gaming community. RTX titles were few and far between in the beginning, and when seeing the benefits, players sometimes had to take stills and pixel peeps. Finally, the RTX 20 series was the first to be affected by the crypto craze, driving up prices and making availability scarce. These factors result in RTX technologies not having much traction for gamers/creators, and this is evidenced by the fact that the graphics card popularity charts have largely jumped over RTX 30 cards dominated by GeForce GTX 10 and GTX 16 cards.
In recent years and with the era of RTX 30 (Ampere) graphics cards, RTX technologies such as real-time ray tracing, DLSS 2+ and AI acceleration have penetrated deeply. Additionally, Nvidia has partnered with leading game engine manufacturers to ensure that new AAA games feature ray tracing and DLSS from day one.
Looking at the data in the table, we see that the balance of apps to games was 114-254 last week. Reflecting on the applications, the well-known Adobe suite primarily uses AI acceleration with Nvidia RTX hardware. However, RTX real-time ray tracing is also widely used by applications from many manufacturers that focus on 3D modeling and rendering work. With a long list of games, there seems to be a trend of remastering older games and re-releasing RTX technologies as part of the process.
Nvidia’s latest RTX technologies are somewhat controversial. For example, the new DLSS 3 is only supported on the latest RTX 40 (Ada Lovelace) GPUs. Nvidia Video Super Resolution recently debuted, requiring at least RTX 30 series GPUs to support it – and there’s no obvious reason why RTX 20 cards couldn’t be used for this feature. In summary, these RTX technologies are welcome and interesting. Despite this, the PC community favors open standards, and artificial barriers to encourage upgrades are undesirable.
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