You don’t actually need RT Cores for raytracing in Battlefield V
Well, it seems that needing dedicated RT cores in Turing for DirectX Raytracing in Battlefield V is a load of bollocks. A user in the 3DCenter forum (it’s in German) has validated that he managed to enable DXR in Battlefield V with a NVIDIA TITAN V, which is based on the NVIDIA Volta architecture and lacks dedicated RT cores.
NVIDIA claimed that without RT Cores, real-time raytracing was previously impossible. Perhaps they exaggerated their point a little, because the NVIDIA TITAN V can actually deliver pretty good frame rates in Battlefield V with DXR enabled. All without RT cores.
NVIDIA has went on to explain that DXR can be handled by a software layer by graphics cards without RT cores. Does this mean that RT cores aren’t necessary for real-time raytracing? It does appear to accelerate raytracing, but if it can be handled by regular compute albeit at a slower pace, why isn’t it an option for all graphics cards? Why can’t I use my GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for DXR, probably with lowered settings just to enjoy some cool reflections?
If you check out the official announcement for DXR real-time raytracing in Battlefield V on NVIDIA’s webpage, you will find that one of the requirements is a GeForce RTX graphics card. There’s absolutely no mention that a TITAN V can handle it. It is possible that NVIDIA refrained from mentioning it because no gamer in their right mind would buy a TITAN V for gaming.
What this might also mean is that AMD cards can actually handle DXR. AMD does offer real-time raytracing via Radeon ProRender, so there is at least some basic support for DXR even with their current graphics solution. Given AMD’s massive compute performance, it just might be possible, although frame rates would probably be quite horrendous.
![[CES2019] Intel 10nm Ice Lake processors are coming — will come together with a serious >1TFLOP GPU! - 23](https://pokde.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/intel-ice-lake-processor-cover-1.jpg "[CES2019] Intel 10nm Ice Lake processors are coming — will come together with a serious >1TFLOP GPU! - 24")
Still it goes without saying that it is still a better deal to get a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, rather than the NVIDIA TITAN V. It costs less than half the price of the NVIDIA TITAN V, and you still get faster performance. It’s a win!
Pokdepinion: So we could actually have DXR on all cards, but we can’t. Just because.
