Today’s the day that Microsoft’s DirectX ray tracing tech (or DXR for brief) arrives on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 10-series and 16-series graphics playing cards. First introduced three weeks ago, Nvidia’s newest Game Ready driver, out right this moment, will enable everybody with a 6GB GTX 1060 upwards to reap the benefits of all of the shiny shadow and reflection enhancements in games comparable to Metro Exodus, Battlefield V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider presently solely loved by their Nvidia RTX cousins.
The massive query, although, is whether or not DXR will find yourself nuking these playing cards’ efficiency with out the help of correct RT (or ray tracing) Cores discovered on Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. I’ll be testing this out myself very shortly, however to assist in giving you an early thought of what to anticipate, Nvidia have launched some useful efficiency graphs. Let’s have a look.
In a briefing held earlier right this moment, Nvidia had been eager to emphasize how the efficiency hit of including DXR to the combo can range wildly between totally different titles. Some ray tracing-enabled games, for instance, use lighter ray tracing strategies, such because the reflections in Battlefield V and the shadows in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, whereas others flip it as much as eleven with each superior shadow / reflection method going. Those are your Metro Exoduses and Atomic Hearts. As a consequence, lighter DXR games will naturally work higher with lower-end GTX graphics playing cards, and heavier DXR games will probably be utterly unplayable.
You can see from the header up the highest there which strategies are being utilized by present ray tracing-enabled games. Below, you’ll see how difficult that’s in apply. The extra a game has to bounce these mild rays round a scene, the extra intensive the ray tracing workload goes to be.
But sufficient about how ray tracing works. You’re right here for these juicy graphs. Unhelpfully, all of Nvidia’s graphs are for 2560×1440 efficiency on High or Ultra settings – one thing they themselves beforehand warned merely wouldn’t be doable on a GTX card once they first introduced this truly taking place. Plus, they’ve performed all their exams with one in all Intel’s tremendous highly effective Core i9-7900X processors, which merely isn’t consultant of what most of us regular individuals even have of their PCs.
So straight off the bat, then, none of this data goes to be notably helpful, particularly in terms of figuring out real-world efficiency at vaguely playable settings. However, there are nonetheless just a few attention-grabbing issues to notice right here, specifically how nicely our present best graphics card for 1080p winner, the GTX 1660 Ti, compares with Nvidia’s far more costly GTX 1080.
In Battlefield V, for instance (above, click on to enlarge), the GTX 1660 Ti is definitely neck-and-neck with the GTX 1080, as is the GTX 1660 with the GTX 1070. That’s fairly spectacular contemplating how less expensive the GTX 16-series playing cards are, and simply goes to indicate how a lot work their Turing GPU’s placing in regardless of the absence of correct RT cores.
The similar goes for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the place each units of playing cards are as soon as once more just about producing nigh-on similar speeds. Of course, solely the GTX 1080 Ti is even vaguely playable on these settings, nevertheless it bodes nicely for the type of efficiency new GTX 16-series homeowners can anticipate to see at 1920×1080 on barely decrease high quality settings in comparison with their “more powerful” 10-series counterparts.
There will nonetheless be some games, nevertheless, comparable to Metro Exodus, the place these top-end 10-series playing cards trump all, as you may see within the graph above. Sure, it’s nonetheless not playable on these frankly mad settings, however it should nearly actually stand you in higher stead than both the GTX 1660 or GTX 1660 Ti when you dial the settings again a bit.
As I mentioned above, I’ll be testing these games out to convey you some correct efficiency evaluation very quickly, however for now, it appears prefer it’s going to be fairly excellent news for GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti homeowners.
