NVIDIA GeForce GTX cards will also be capable of raytracing soon
Remember when we caught wind of a TITAN V being capable of raytracing in Battlefield V as well? Some people were saying that it was quite ridiculous to expect NVIDIA to ever unlock DirectX Raytracing (DXR) support on older Pascal cards. Well, it seems like they actually did.
Every card from the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and up, will now support basic raytracing capabilities. However NVIDIA does remind everyone that even a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti will struggle to handle any meaningful raytracing, especially if the game uses more than one raytracing effect.
[carousel arrows=”display”]
[panel]
[/panel]
[panel]
[/panel]
[/carousel]
In Battlefield V which only employs raytraced reflections, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is 1.6x slower than a GeForce RTX 2080. Once we get to Port Royal which takes advantage of raytraced shadows and reflections, the GeForce RTX 2080 widens the gap by being 5x as fast as a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
It’s worth mentioning that the RT cores aren’t the only reason why the GeForce RTX cards will stop over any GeForce GTX card when handling raytracing though. The improvements brought about by the Turing shaders cannot be overlooked as well, as seen in this utilization graph in a single frame of Metro Exodus.
The cards that will be supporting DirectX Raytracing after the driver update are:
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (Pascal)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (Turing)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Pascal)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (Turing)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (Pascal)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Pascal)
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (Pascal)
- NVIDIA TITAN X (Pascal)
- NVIDIA TITAN XP (Pascal)
- NVIDIA TITAN V (Volta)
Both laptop and desktop variants of the above GPUs will also see DXR enabled. But then again, it’s worth mentioning that none of these cards will actually enable a good experience in raytraced games. It’s probably more of a case of “can we” rather than “should we”.
Now one other thing I am curious about: can we use a second Pascal card as a “RT card” like how you could throw in a second GPU as a PhysX card back then?
Pokdepinion: Well I was always behind the idea of giving gamers on older cards a chance to try out DXR for themselves. They will probably be more motivated to upgrade if the experience sucks rather than being unable to experience it at all.
