Nvidia provides Geforce GTX graphics card support for DirectX Raytracing

One of the great new features of Nvidia’s architecture Turing is support for realistic lighting via ray tracing, which for decades has been described as the holy grail of 3D rendering. However, the technology requires support for special accelerators in the form of built-in RT cores, with the result that only Geforce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 support this.

During Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announces that this will change soon. Several older graphics cards but also fresh Geforce GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660, which are based on the Turing architecture but without RT cores, get support for ray tracing and then more specifically Microsoft’s interface DirectX Raytracing (DXR).

In addition to Turing in the middle class, it is exclusively about graphics cards based on the previous and today still current architecture Pascal, from the middle class and up in the hierarchy – Geforce GTX 1060 (6 GB), GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, Titan X and Titan XP. The support also applies to the graphics cards’ portable diton, including energy-optimized Max-Q Design.

The fact that the support is limited to these models is attributed to the fact that DirectX Raytracing is an extension of DirectX 12, where graphics cards older than the Geforce GTX 1000 series often do not live up to expectations. Furthermore, it is a performance-intensive technology, which is why Nvidia does not provide support for the GTX 1060 (3 GB) and below.

Unlike the Geforce RTX series which has built-in support for accelerating precisely ray tracing there is something missing in the remaining models, which makes these significantly slower for the purpose. The graphics cards without RTX are therefore only supported for simpler ones ray tracingeffects with fewer light rays.

The much larger install base of RT-capable GPUs will fuel developer adoption of ray tracing technology, bringing more games for both GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX users to experience. GeForce GTX gamers will have an opportunity to use ray tracing at lower RT quality settings and resolutions, while GeForce RTX users will experience up to 2-3x faster performance thanks to the dedicated RT Cores on their GPUs, enabling the use of higher-quality settings and resolutions at higher framerates.

The fact that Nvidia is releasing the single biggest news with its latest graphics card series on a broad front is motivated by the fact that they want to speed up the implementation in games. Nvidia thus hopes that game developers will take advantage of this as the installation base with support for DirectX Raytracing, albeit limited in terms of function and performance, will be many times larger than at present.

Nvidia plans to release a new Game Ready driver that powers the above models with support for DirectX Raytracing in April.

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