NVIDIA Celebrates 500 RTX Games With A $500 Gift Card Giveaway And More Sweet Prizes
NVIDIA has reached a fairly impressive milestone with its RTX technologies—there are now over 500 games and applications that support RTX in some form or another. The achievement arrives five years after the introduction of the very first GeForce RTX graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 20 series based on Turing, which later extended into newer generation architectures and models, namely the GeForce RTX 30 and now 40 series (plus some professional models). To celebrate the occasion, NVIDIA is serving up some sweet prizes.
The biggest one is a whopping $500 gift card for Green Man Gaming, the popular e-commerce platform where you can find discounted digital keys for PC and Xbox games, including Steam keys. NVIDIA is giving away 200 of these gift cards, which have a cumulative value of $100,000. There do not appear to be any restrictions with the cards—winners will be able to use them on any games and DCL add-ons that Green Man Gaming offers.
Additionally, NVIDIA will be awarding an unspecified number of RTXOn keycaps throughout the month of December. And if that weren't enough, it's also teaming up with CD Projekt Red (CDPR) to give away "something very special" to celebrate the achievement, as well as the launch of Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition. What exactly it will be is a mystery, but for that particular gift, NVIDIA says users will need to follow Cyberpunk 2077's official X/Twitter account for more details.
Why all the hoopla? In some respects, the arrival of RTX has truly been a game-changing moment in gaming. NVIDIA deserves credit for pushing real-time ray tracing into the mainstream with a combination of hardware (dedicated RT cores) and software (drivers and supported games). Yes, what's out there is mostly a mix of real-time ray tracing and rasterized graphics, but you have to start somewhere, right?
There's more to RTX than just ray tracing, too. There's also NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling technology.
"RTX encompasses an ecosystem of technologies that make high-performance, high fidelity gaming a reality. Ray tracing, powered by dedicated RT Cores, brings immersive and realistic lighting and reflections to games. NVIDIA DLSS, made possible by Tensor Cores, enables industry-leading AI graphics acceleration, capable of delivering up to 5 times faster performance in Cyberpunk 2077," NVIDIA boasts in a press release.
Gamers who have the hardware to run RTX effects typically turn it on, according to some stats NVIDIA shared. For example, in Alan Wake II and Minecraft with RTX For Windows 10, nearly every gamer (99%) who owns a GeForce RTX 40 series graphics card enables either real-time ray tracing or DLSS (or both, we assume).
Another fun fact from NVIDIA: For every minute played in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty with RT Overdrive at 4K (100 FPS), DLSS generates 43.5 billion AI pixels, or 7 out of 8 pixels. The game also features 16X more RT operations than Battlefield V, first RTX-supported game released in 2018. And there are 87 million hours of RTX games played each week, NVIDIA says.
Check out NVIDIA's blog post for more details on the giveaway.
