OcUK Academy: The Brand New YouTube Series!

Here at OcUK we’re pleased to announce the arrival of our brand new YouTube series: Overclockers UK Academy! In our first episode, our in-house expert Jacob is kicking things off with a deep-dive into the world of ray-tracing, what makes it so special and just why you need one of ASUS’s new NVIDIA RTX-enabled laptops!

For this week’s episode, we’re starting out with the poster boy for the world of real-time ray-tracing: Metro Exodus. For the uninitiated, in case you managed to miss all the furore, ray-tracing involves calculating the path of rays of light as they interact with different surfaces and substances. Everything from rocks, to stained glass windows, to the glint of light in a sniper’s scope – the level of realism portrayed onscreen ultimately comes down to the number of times the light’s interactions with the aforementioned materials have been analysed and processed by the GPU.

Needless to say, depicting such unparalleled levels of detail doesn’t come without a price: maintaining above-60 FPS performance can be a real challenge. Fortunately, NVIDIA has stepped into the breach once more and while their graphics cards provide plenty of raw power, their intelligent DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) utilises the card’s integrated AI-driven Tensor cores to reduce the computational load on the graphics pipelines. Essentially, AI helps the GPU to learn to perform anti-aliasing functions selectively and intelligently. This means that you get the best of both worlds, high-performance without having to compromise on graphical fidelity, and after you’ve seen RTX in action, there’s really no going back to regular gaming.

But what about the gameplay, you ask? Ray-tracing rides a fine line between, strictly speaking, being purely graphics-oriented tech and something that takes standard games and takes them to the next level. As Jacob (lucky him!) discovers in his Metro Exodus deep dive, the benefits of RTX also as much to the gameplay as to the aesthetics. Games that are heavily dependent upon environmental effects to drive the narrative benefit tremendously from the increased levels of realism. Those shadows you see in the distance? All calculated in real-time as night descends on the world of Metro Exodus. But it’s one thing to take the fight to the monsters of 2033 in high resolution or with smooth framerates, but it’s quite another to see a realistic sunset as you rush to create an equally realistic campfire to keep them at bay!

But ray-tracing is about more than just light and shadows, it affects the depiction of all manner of natural phenomena in the virtual world. Fire benefits in particular from the realism that ray-tracing allows. We don’t know exactly what creative mechanics games developers will come up with next to make the most of these new abilities, but what we can safely assume is that this technology is certain to put a ray-traced fire under hardware manufacturers to drive performance to the next level.

Click below to get up to speed on the world of RTX:

The ASUS Zephyrus S GX531 GX:

Specification	Detail
Screen Size	15.6″
Screen Type	15.6″ FHD IPS Level , 144hz
Screen Resolution	1920*1080
Backlight	LED
Processor	Intel®Core™ i7-8750H Processor 2.2 GHz (9M Cache, up to 4.1 GHz)
Graphics	GeForce® RTX 2080 8GB GDDR6 Max-Q
Storage	512GB PCI-e SSD
Memory	16GB DDR4 2666 mhz
Operating System	Windows 10 Pro (64bit)
Lan	Ethernet: 10/100/1000,Mbps Wireless: 802.11 ac 2×2 Wave 2
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 5.0
USB Ports	1x Type A 3.1 (Gen.2) 1 x Type C 3.1 (Gen.1) 1 x Type C 3.1 (Gen.2) 2 x Type A 2.0
Display Ports	1x HDMI,2.0
Dimensions	36.0(W) x 26.8(D) x 1.53 ~ 1.61(H) cm
Weight	2.1 kgs
Warranty	2 Year
Extra Features	HD Webcam (30fps@720p), Illuminated Chiclet Keyboard 4-Zone RGB, 2x2W Speakers, Aura Sync