What’s the Difference Between NVIDIA RTX and GTX?

Popular titles such as Control, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Metro Exodus and Minecraft illustrate the eye-opening difference in visual impact offered by the NVIDIA RTX series.
by Scott Martin

When it comes to gaming, new graphics means a new way to see the world.

The NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture powers both the GeForce RTX 20-Series and GTX 16-Series cards. As the world’s most advanced architecture, Turing brings exceptional performance and efficiency as well as next-generation shading technology to the latest games.

Additionally, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX platform offers real-time ray tracing and AI for an entirely new gaming experience. RTX offers stunningly accurate lighting like shadows, reflections, refractions and global illumination. With more realistic scenes, gaming is more intense and exhilarating than ever before.

Popular titles such as Control and Metro Exodus illustrate the eye-opening difference in visual impact offered by the NVIDIA RTX series.

And many more new RTX titles are joining the scene — Minecraft, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Watch Dogs: Legion, Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Cyberpunk 2077 to name just a few.

The best way to comprehend the difference between RTX and GTX is to see it.

Above is a scene from Battlefield V that allows you to interact with “RTX on” or “RTX off” to experience the differences in visuals. Click the image and then move the slider here between “RTX on” and “RTX off” to see the differences in lighting.

What Is RTX?

NVIDIA RTX graphics cards are the first to include RT Cores. This dedicated ray-tracing hardware can cast upwards of 10 gigarays per second, allowing real-time, movie-like lighting in games. Real-time ray tracing is only possible because RTX graphics cards deliver up to 6x faster ray-tracing performance.

Above is a scene from Metro Exodus that shows off the immersive details gained from real-time ray tracing. Click the image and then move the slider here between “RTX on” and “RTX off” to see the differences in lighting.

RTX graphics cards are also the first to offer Tensor Cores capable of delivering over 100 teraflops of AI processing to accelerate gaming performance with NVIDIA DLSS.

For those looking for a gaming GPU that will handle the next generation of immersive game titles, RTX is a great way to go.

RTX Versus GTX

Technology features:RTX 20-SeriesGTX 16-SeriesGTX 10-Series
Turing ArchitectureYesYesNo
NVIDIA Adaptive ShadingYesYesNo
VR ReadyYesGTX 1660 or higherGTX 1060 or higher
Concurrent Floating Point & Integer OperationsYesYesNo
Turing NVIDIA Encoder (NVENC)YesYes (except 1650)No
Ray-Tracing CoresYesNoNo
Tensor CoresYesNoNo
NVIDIA DLSSYesNoNo

While only RTX cards have RT and Tensor Cores, the GTX 16-Series uses the shared Turing architecture to offer huge leaps in performance. Games like Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus are already making use of Turing’s concurrent floating point and integer operation, and advanced shading, including variable rate shading to deliver higher frame rates with lower power consumption.

GTX cards excel at both immersive and competitive gaming, providing great experiences in popular titles like Fortnite, Overwatch and Counterstrike: Global Offensive. Gamers can share their gaming experience with a streaming audience with lower overhead and higher quality with Turing’s new NVENC*. And for retro gaming, Turing brings hardware integer scaling for crisp pixel art.

Gamers looking for a GPU for traditional games can grab a GTX card for amazing performance and value.

Learn more about NVIDIA RTX and NVIDIA GTX.