they then revealed that this was in fact rendered in real-time using ray-traced reflections, area light shadows, and ambient occlusion on a $70,000 four-GPU Volta-architecture NVIDIA DGX workstation. This was a major advancement that captured global attention, as previously real-time ray tracing at this level of fidelity had been impossible, with all ray tracing instead done offline on gigantic server farms. Fast forward to August 2018 and the announcement of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti at Gamescom, and now Reflections: An Unreal Engine Real-Time Ray Tracing Demonstration could run on just one GeForce RTX consumer graphics card thanks to the Turing architecture’s RT Cores that greatly accelerate ray tracing performance.

Of note, this version has been enhanced with Deep Learning Super Sampling tech, to boost performance, and NVIDIA implemented new DXR updates and optimizations to further improve the quality of this stunning slice of entertainment.

Once you’ve downloaded the 1.5GB demo, extract the zip, open the new folder, and run ElevatorDemo.exe. For demo controls, check out the included README.txt.