Eight years ago today, Nvidia's Turing architecture reached enthusiasts for the first time with the GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. According to Tom's Hardware, those cards led the charge in making ray tracing a central talking point in PC gaming, even if the games themselves were not ready to back it up.
The RTX 20 series marked a turning point by putting dedicated ray tracing hardware in consumer GPUs. But the initial software ecosystem lagged behind the hardware, with Tom's Hardware noting that games were "thin on the ground" at launch. The obsession with ray tracing would grow over the following years as more titles and newer GPU generations arrived.
For PC gamers, the anniversary is a reminder that today's widespread ray tracing support began with a hardware bet that took time to pay off. The source does not compare the RTX 20 launch to other GPU releases; it simply highlights that the ray tracing era started on this day{