NVIDIA released a new Game Ready Driver today that enables millions of more gamers with GeForce GTX GPUs to experience ray tracing for the first time ever. The official announcement was made back in March, where NVIDIA stated that ray tracing will be enabled on selected GTX cards.
According to the latest update from NVIDIA, the following GeForce GPUs are now DXR-capable:
- GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1660
- NVIDIA TITAN Xp (2017)
- NVIDIA TITAN X (2016)
- GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1080
- GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
- GeForce GTX 1070
- GeForce GTX 1060 6GB
- And laptops with equivalent Pascal and Turing-architecture GPUs
Ray Tracing Now Available For Selected GTX Cards
Do note that the update is meant for the listed GTX cards owners to experience DXR only. With this new driver, GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and higher GPUs can execute ray-tracing instructions on traditional shader cores, giving gamers a taste, albeit at lower RT quality settings and resolutions, of how ray tracing will dramatically change the way games are experienced.
Though, NVIDIA did highlight that 1080p is pretty much the limit for the GTX cards, due to the lack of dedicated RT cores. With dedicated RT cores, GeForce RTX GPUs provide up to 2-3x faster performance in ray-traced games, enabling more effects, higher ray counts, and higher resolutions for the best experience.
Based on the above result, you can pretty much see the performance gap between RTX and GTX cards when it comes to RTX games with DXR option enabled. NVIDIA also recommend that you use 1080p for better result if you wish to experience DXR with GTX cards.
As there are quite a number of ray tracing technique being implemented in different RTX games, not all of them will behave the same. Based on the table above, you can see the types of ray tracing technique and it’s characteristics. To make it simple, the workload on processing the ray tracing increases with the number of rays involved.
If you wish to enjoy RTX games better, we strongly recommend you to go with at least an RTX 2060 that has dedicated RT cores required to process ray tracing better.
