Nvidia has released a brand new driver that allows ray tracing effects to be switched on in GeForce GTX 10- and 16-series graphics cards, like the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1660.
Ray tracing may be a resource-intensive feature that produces rendering lighting, shadows, and reflections in real time look a lot of realistic — and thanks to new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) support, you’ll be ready to check it out with the painfully little batch of games that have actually adopted ray tracing.
By increasing compatibility for ray tracing to Nvidia’s older cards, a lot of people will check out global illumination in Metro: Exodus, or see the reflective puddles in battlefield V while not having to shop for new hardware.
That’s cool, however don’t expect great, or perhaps sensible, performance. If RTX-series cards were engineered to display however good ray tracing will look in motion, its purpose on lesser GPUs within the GTX 10-series looks geared to point out however it’s frame by frame. We’re headed into choppy waters here.
As my colleague Sean Hollister noted at Nvidia’s GDC event, even the GTX 1080 Ti — still one in every of the most powerful GPUs on the market — will only squeeze out around 30 FPS whereas running Shadow of the place Raider with ray tracing settings enabled on a high-end play rig with a Core i9 CPU.
The results do get interesting with the new $279 GTX 1660 Ti, though. That card is alleged to be roughly equivalent to the GTX 1070 in most cases, however the benchmark shows that its turing cores facilitate to bring it closer to the GTX 1080 once it comes to play with ray tracing activated.
Some people, myself included, purchased an RTX graphics card with the hope that ray tracing would have taken off in a very larger way by now. That hasn’t however happened, and with the release of this driver, I’m almost a bit jealous that hold-outs get to try it before i get my full bragging rights.
