Nvidia GTX Graphics Cards: Getting Ray Tracing In April?

Apparently, Pascal video cards can receive traces.

Until now, Nvidia has viewed ray tracing as an exclusive feature only available on Turing graphics cards, but now the company is unexpectedly enabling the feature on low-end graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 1060.

On the first day of GDC 2019, Nvidia announced that it will introduce a driver in April that will allow Pascal and Turing GTX graphics cards to render ray tracing effects using DirectX Raytracing (DXR). The list of supported graphics cards includes both the recently introduced GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660, as well as the GTX 1060 (6GB) and Titan X.

These Turing and Pascal GTX graphics cards will be able to handle games that use basic RT effects and fewer beams – or in other words, graphics cards will be able to handle the RTX setting in Low mode – although the gaming experience may vary depending on the games you play. playing.

| HOW WELL DOES IT WORK?

During our brief briefing, we were told that Battlefield V should perform well on most graphics cards with medium to high RTX settings, as the game mostly only reproduces reflected beams. Meanwhile, some of the very heavy shadows of Shadow of the Tomb Raider (which has yet to be patched with RTX and DLSS support) can slow down your GPU.

Metro Exodus is the most capricious game of all, as it uses ray tracing technology to power the entire global illumination engine. Nvidia emphasizes that users will have a better experience with RTX graphics cards.

According to Nvidia, the ray tracing coming to GTX graphics cards was planned from the start. That said, this claim seems to directly contradict all of the company’s marketing and numbers, which previously indicated that ray tracing would not be possible to reproduce on graphics cards without dedicated RT cores.

If anything, it looks like Nvidia is trying to get ahead of the likelihood that the PS5 and Xbox Two might receive ray tracing. Nvidia would find itself in a quandary if the new consoles could play games with DXR and all the new technologies, although the previous generation video cards could not.

In a short note, Nvidia also announced that it is bringing DXR to Unreal Engine and Unity. With ray tracing technology integrated into the two main game engines that power 90% of the world’s games, we are likely to see more ray traced games in the near future.