With GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and higher graphics cards expected to be able to enable RTX specific effects, like real-time DXR global illumination in Metro Exodus as well as the ray-traced reflections in Battlefield V as part of a new Game Ready Driver coming in April. This is great news for PC gamers, as it will effectively open up the previous high-end RTX-only effects to a huge market.

Of course the results will mean lower performance without the dedicated RTX cores found in GPUs like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2060. As the following technical explanation covers.

RT Cores on GeForce RTX GPUs provide dedicated hardware to accelerate BVH and ray / triangle intersection calculations, dramatically accelerating ray tracing. On GeForce GTX hardware, these calculations are performed on the shader cores, a resource shared with many other graphics functions of the GPU.

Which is as expected as ray-tracing or DXR as found in DirectX is not limited to hardware, but a technique that simply requires a lot of processing grunt to properly render. Interestingly the new Turing based GTX cards, the 1660 Ti and the new 1660, offer advantages over the older Pascal models.

On Pascal-architecture GPUs we see that ray tracing and all other graphics rendering tasks are handled by FP32 Pascal shader cores. This takes longer to perform, translating to a lower FPS. The Turing architecture introduced INT32 Cores that operate simultaneously alongside FP32 Cores.

Very cool. The following admittedly internal benchmarks show the performance difference at 1440p with Ultra-level ray-tracing - so it's expected that older GTX cards (including the GTX 1080) would need to set ray-tracing detail settings to low.





With NVIDIA clearly focused on implementing next-gen effects like real-time ray tracing right now, wider support could lead to more adoption by games.