Ray-tracing hardware is designed to accelerate ray-tracing calculations, a technique used in computer graphics to create realistic 3D images. It differs from the more common rasterization approach by finding all intersections between rays and 3D primitives (triangles or polygons) in a scene.
Ray tracing can produce highly realistic images with accurate lighting, shadows, and reflections. However, it is computationally intensive, requiring specialized hardware to achieve real-time or near-real-time performance. Various companies have developed ray-tracing hardware, including ART-VPS, Caustic Graphics, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple.
In 2018, Nvidia introduced the GeForce RTX series of GPUs with dedicated "RT cores" for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Subsequently, AMD, Qualcomm, and Arm also released GPUs with ray-tracing support. These advancements have made ray tracing more accessible and have enabled its adoption in various applications, including video games, animation, and architectural visualization.