NVIDIA’s ray tracing tech will soon run on older GTX cards

NVIDIA has introduced that its ray-tracing tech, only to be had on its new RTX playing cards thus far, is coming to its older GeForce GTX 10-collection playing cards in April. The generation will paintings on GPUs from the GTX 1060 and up, albeit with a few critical caveats. Some games like Battlefield V will run simply nice and deliver higher visuals, but other games, like the freshly launched Metro Exodus, will run at just 18 fps at 1440p — manifestly an unplayable body-price.

What video games you may be able to play with ray-tracing tech (additionally known as DXR) on NVIDIA GTX playing cards depends totally on how it’s applied. In Battlefield V, for instance, the tech is simplest used for things like reflections. On top of that, you may dial down the energy of the impact so that it consumes much less computing horsepower.

Metro Exodus, on the other hand, makes use of ray tracing to create especially practical “global illumination” outcomes, simulating lights from the real world. It’s the first sport that absolutely showed the capacity of RTX playing cards and in reality, generated a few exhilaration about the tech. However, because it is so computationally in depth, GTX cards (which do not have the RTX tensor cores) will efficaciously be too gradual to run it.

NVIDIA defined that once it becomes first growing the next-gen RTX tech, it discovered chips the use of Pascal tech might be “monster” sized and consume as much as 650 watts. That’s due to the fact the older playing cards lack both the integer cores and tensor cores discovered at the RTX cards. They get especially caught on ray-tracing, running about four instances slower than the RTX playing cards on Metro Exodus.

Since Metro Exodus is so closely ray-traced, the RTX cards run it 3 instances quicker than older GTX 10-collection cards. However, that falls to two instances for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and 1.6 times for Battlefield V, due to the fact both of these video games use ray tracing less. The brand new GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti GPUs, which do not have RT but do have integer cores, will run ray-traced video games moderately higher than last-gen 10-series GPUs.

None of this turned into an awful lot of an issue up until now, due to the fact there have been clearly no games apart from Battlefield V that took benefit of ray tracing. However, NVIDIA also announced that Unity and Unreal Engine, the 2 largest gaming engines, now guide ray-tracing. That way that builders can put in force the tech by way of basically simply flipping it on, making it probable you’ll see it in greater video games quickly.

NVIDIA also unveiled a brand new set of gear for the one’s recreation engines known as GameWorks RTX to be able to assist builders put into effect ray-traced video games. It includes the RTX Denoiser SDK that allows actual-time ray-tracing through strategies that reduce the desired ray count and a wide variety of samples in step with the pixel. It will assist ray-traced results like location mild shadows, glossy reflections, ambient occlusion and diffuse worldwide illumination (the latter is used in Metro Exodus). Suffice to mention, all of these matters will make a sport look loads prettier.

Finally, the organization unveiled a few extra ray-traced games and studies, inclusive of Nexon’s Dragonhound (proven above), Quake II RTX, and demo video called Control. NVIDIA will show off all of those video games at GDC, so we’ll try to get a more in-depth appearance.

It’s been a yr because NVIDIA unveiled RTX GPUS, and the technology is off to a sluggish begin, to mention the least. Now that some games are arriving, NVIDIA is at the least doing the proper component with the aid of unlocking the tech for buyers of older cards. Just preserve your expectancies low when NVIDIA releases RT drivers for GTX cards a subsequent month.