NVIDIA NCA-AIIO Exam - Topic 2 Question 16 Discussion

Ray Tracing Cores, introduced in NVIDIA's RTX architecture, are specialized hardware units built to accelerate ray-tracing computations---simulating light interactions (e.g., reflections, shadows) for photorealistic rendering in real time. CUDA Cores handle general-purpose parallel tasks, and Tensor Cores optimize matrix operations for AI, but only Ray Tracing Cores target lighting simulation.

(Reference: NVIDIA GPU Architecture Whitepaper, Section on Ray Tracing Cores)