https://www.cnet.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-ray-tracing-driver-is-here-but-try-not-to-expect-too-much/

The new generation of RTX GPUs based on Nvidia's Turing architecture arrived last summer, bringing two headline features: processing cores devoted to ray tracing (RT cores) -- the same kind of rendering that's used in almost every 3D animation -- and Tensor cores for accelerating the neural network processing which underlies DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), Nvidia's new AI-based scaling algorithms which more realistically simulate detail when the graphics processing load starts to punish performance.

A less glamorous advance is the concurrent floating-point execution pipeline, which improves overall performance with parallel processing for the myriad calculations which underlie rendering.