Nvidia adds support for DirectX Raytracing to GTX graphics cards

Nvidia will provide some GTX video cards with Pascal and Turing GPUs with support for Microsoft DXR in April. DXR stands for DirectX Raytracing and the driver update gives the older video cards basic support for ray tracing effects.

Nvidia announced the arrival of DXR support during the tenth edition of the GPU Technology Conference. The driver that will be released in April will bring DXR support to the GTX 1060 6GB and more powerful cards with Pascal GPU, up to the Titan XP. In addition, support is coming to the recently announced GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660. These have Turing GPUs, but lack the RT cores for hardware support for Nvidia’s implementation for real-time ray tracing. Microsoft announced DirectX Raytracing for the DirectX 12 API last year.

Nvidia therefore emphasizes that DXR only brings basic ray tracing effects with a relatively small number of light rays to the GTX cards. Complex lighting effects are probably not to be expected, but simpler reproduction of, for example, shadows and reflections is. Support for the image enhancement technique dlss or deep learning super sampling does not bring the driver update either.

Nvidia explained that a GTX 1080 Ti with only fp32 cores takes considerably longer to render a ray tracing frame at Metro Exodus than a Turing GPU that can also use int32 cores and that an RTX 2080 thanks to its RT and Tensor cores can do this a lot faster. The question is therefore how DXR will perform in practice on the older video cards in games.

Anyway, the game engines will support Unreal Engine, Unity and CryEngine DXR. Incidentally, Nvidia is also adding ray tracing support for the Vulkan API to its video cards.