NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Tech Will Soon Run On Older GTX Cards (engadget.com)

NVIDIA's older GeForce GTX 10-series cards will be getting the company's new ray-tracing tech in April. The technology, which is currently only available on its new RTX cards, "will work on GPUs from the 1060 and up, albeit with some serious caveats," reports Engadget. "Some games like Battlefield V will run just fine and deliver better visuals, but other games, like the freshly released Metro Exodus, will run at just 18 fps at 1440p -- obviously an unplayable frame-rate." From the report: What games you'll be able to play with ray-tracing tech (also known as DXR) on NVIDIA GTX cards depends entirely on how it's implemented. In Battlefield V, for instance, the tech is only used for things like reflections. On top of that, you can dial down the strength of the effect so that it consumes less computing horsepower. Metro Exodus, on the other hand, uses ray tracing to create highly realistic "global illumination" effects, simulating lighting from the real world. It's the first game that really showed the potential of RTX cards and actually generated some excitement about the tech. However, because it's so computationally intensive, GTX cards (which don't have the RTX tensor cores) will be effectively be too slow to run it.

NVIDIA explained that when it was first developing the next gen RTX tech, it found chips using Pascal tech would be "monster" sized and consume up to 650 watts. That's because the older cards lack both the integer cores and tensor cores found on the RTX cards. They get particularly stuck on ray-tracing, running about four times slower than the RTX cards on Metro Exodus. Since Metro Exodus is so heavily ray-traced, the RTX cards run it three times quicker than older GTX 10-series cards. However, that falls to two times for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and 1.6 times for Battlefield V, because both of those games use ray tracing less. The latest GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti GPUs, which don't have RT but do have integer cores, will run ray-traced games moderately better than last-gen 10-series GPUs. NVIDIA also announced that Unity and Unreal Engine now support ray-tracing, allowing developers to implement the tech into their games. Developers can use NVIDIA's new set of tools called GameWorks RTX to achieve this.

"It includes the RTX Denoiser SDK that enables real-time ray-tracing through techniques that reduce the required ray count and number of samples per pixel," adds Engadget. "It will support ray-traced effects like area light shadows, glossy reflections, ambient occlusion and diffuse global illumination (the latter is used in Metro Exodus). Suffice to say, all of those things will make game look a lot prettier."

Comments

I remember them doing this with phsyx

[rsilvergun]

for my old GTX 240. It sucks. Some games wouldn't let you turn it off, and since there was no hardware acceleration it all ran on my CPU. I was running a GTX 240, you can bet my CPU couldn't do physx.

By all accounts Ray Tracing already cuts framerates in half. I can't imagine a world where this works.

Re:I remember them doing this with phsyx

[jellomizer]

Not all games need to be fast pace twitch action games. Some games can focus more on graphics detail, vs high frame rates. Also for the cut-scenes, They can be custom rendered in semi-real time, to give a cut scene customizable to the action at hand. having your character in the right spot. That item you had destroyed will show its current state.

Also to a point, just because you don't want to upgrade, why should game designers try to stick so far behind that waiting for that one guy to upgrade.

Re:I remember them doing this with phsyx

[thegarbz]

So, in other words, not enough people upgraded to the new RTX series video cards yet so they need to cripple the existing GTX series cards with a driver "update" that forces real time ray tracing down everyone's throats whether or not their card can support it.

Don't be daft, you can't enable ray tracing through a driver update. There is a long and complicated process getting games to support it and 100% of both games that support it offer it to be disabled due to crippling the performance of the games.

Calm down, drink a beer, and realise that for the long history of people accusing NVIDIA and AMD of crippling older cards through driver updates it has been proven completely false time and time again.

Really?

[fodder69]

> 18 fps at 1440p -- obviously an unplayable frame-rate.

Mother f**kers aint seen me overclocking my celeron to 233MHZ with a box fan to cool it to get 25 FPS in Quake.

Re:Irrelevant to Normal Humans

[thegarbz]

I remained unaware through the whole experience as to whether RTX was on and if it was, what difference it made.

Then you may not be paying attention. The difference is night and day. I don't use that in the traditional english way, I mean literally the difference is like standing in a room with a sun in it, or having the moon stream light through the window.

There's no doubt Metro Exodus is a gorgeous game. Absolutely amazing. The amount of detail they put into lighting and shadows as it was is breathtaking. However if you're creeping in the shadows, moving within buildings, hiding behind things at night, the difference is as obvious as a punch in the face. Running around in the desert at high noon shooting things .... well couldn't tell the difference in the slightest.

On the flip-side DLSS is a load of shit. If my choices were RTX on with DLSS or RTX off as the only two options to get a playable framerate, then the latter wins hands down, and ultimately framerate definitely matters. If I wanted a blurry screen I'd take off my glasses.

Re: 2080, why bother?

[Type44Q]

If you'd in fact been following nVidia driver evolution in Unix/Linux for the past twenty-plus years, you'd realize that it takes more points of data than you've got and far more analysis rhan you've performed before you can reach any conclusion, much less the one you did.

Nvidia - along with their bullshit binary blob - is the standard on Posix-compliant OS's, even if AMD does sound better on paper.

For what it's worth, I've been pretty impressed with Radeons after years of driver improvements... but if I was going to take my chances with a new GPU architecture - on any OS - I know from experience to go with nV.

Re:Competition is Good!

[thegarbz]

Surely nVidia's decision to enable their older cards to run ray tracing has nothing to do with Crysis demoing real time ray tracing on AMD GPUs [techspot.com] a couple days ago.

Unlikely. This was going to happen one way or the other anyway. Microsoft's DXR specifically has fallback modes when dedicated hardware isn't availble and this was announced back when RTX was first released as well. The timing here isn't even convenient since nothing a consumer can buy actually runs on the engine which has been demoed.

real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators. This kinda makes the main selling point of the GeForce 20 series more or less moot.

Oh man I remember and early Slashdot post in the 90s talking about the fact that we don't need 3D Accelerators we just need to optimise our CPU rendering software. Along that time there were many people promising the earth too with newer better graphics that don't require dedicated hardware. The reality was always, just because you can, doesn't mean you should, and definitely doesn't mean it works nearly as good as having dedicated hardware to do it.