Nvidia introduced the GeForce RTX 20 series, bringing real-time ray tracing to its consumer graphics cards in 2018.
The RTX line was built around Nvidia’s Turing architecture. Its defining feature was hardware support for ray tracing, a rendering technique that simulates the paths of light to produce more realistic reflections, shadows, and illumination. The cards also included Tensor Cores for machine-learning workloads.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. It began as a graphics-chip company but expanded into data-center computing, artificial intelligence, professional visualization, and automotive technology.
The company’s rapid market-capitalization growth is closely associated with demand for GPUs used to train and run AI models. GeForce is Nvidia’s gaming brand; its data-center products serve a different market, even though both rely on related GPU technologies.