Nvidia GTX graphics cards get ray tracing support with update

With an update of its Geforce drivers, Nvidia has made ray tracing possible on video cards that do not have specific hardware on board. In practice, this means that Pascal cards now also receive real-time ray tracing support.

The GTX 1080, among others, could display games with real-time ray tracing, says Nvidia. Cards with ray tracing cores on board, so for now all RTX cards, were already able to do that. With the driver, Pascal and Turing cards from the GTX series can handle DXR, the ray tracing implementation in DirectX. The driver enables DXR on cards from the GTX 1060 6GB; slower cards are not powerful enough. Dlss, a technique that, like ray tracing, is performed on RTX cards by cores developed for it, is not coming to GTX cards. These would be too slow for dlss due to the lack of the special Tensor cores.

Nvidia demonstrates DXR support on GTX cards through shared benchmark results, showing that the GTX 1660 Ti performs at about the same level in games with ray tracing support as the GTX 1080. Performance depends on the ray tracing implementation. In games that mainly calculate simple reflections with ray tracing, the GTX cards with DXR still score reasonably well. Once the complexity of reflections increases or much so-called global illumination is calculated, the gap between RTX and GTX cards is much larger.

To illustrate the effects of various ray tracing techniques such as ambient occlusion, shadows, reflections and global illumination, Nvidia has released three new demos in addition to games that use those techniques. The well-known Storm Troopers demo has been released under the name Reflections. In addition, two demos that the video card manufacturer calls Justice and Atomic Heart have become available. As the name implies, Reflections is primarily a demo for ray-tracing complex reflections, much like Atomic Heart, while the previously released Port Royal from 3DMark and the new Justice demo calculate shadows with ray-tracing in addition to complex reflections.