Nvidia is bringing ray tracing to GeForce Experience with improved Ansel support

Nvidia is upgrading its GeForce Experience software to utilize the ray tracing capabilities of its recently announced GeForce RTX series graphics cards. The biggest change involves Ansel, Nvidia's screen grabbing feature.

The new version is called Ansel RTX, naturally, and it paves the way for taking photorealistic screen captures. GeForce Experience and Ansel leverage the tensor cores and RT cores found in new GeForce RTX cards to generate more detailed photos.

As Nvidia explains it, Ansel RTX can take a 1080p screen grab captured by a user and, through some nifty AI processing (inferencing, specifically), generate an 8K up-res photo. This is highlighted in the photo above, which we cropped from one of Nvidia's GeForce Experience slides. The primary benefit, it seems, is to see more details when zooming in on objects.

Ansel RTX is also supposed to make screens look better in general. With the right hardware (GeForce RTX), it can process light rays to bring out more details in scenes. Compared to real-time ray tracing, Ansel RTX can process 30 times more rays since it's only dealing with a single scene. There will be new filters to play with as well.

In supported games, GeForce RTX owners can take 360-degree and VR photos, and move the camera around freely. In addition, Nvidia is expanding Ansel to hundreds of games. There is a new mode that enables some of Ansel features without SDK integration.

It's not clear when the updated GeForce Experience with Ansel RTX will roll out, though we imagine it will around the same time as the GeForce RTX cards ship (September 20).

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).