Real-time ray tracing is coming subsequent month to Pascal GPUs.
Nvidia has announced that Pascal GPUs starting with the GTX 1060 all the best way as much as the Titan XP will help ray tracing following the discharge of an official driver replace due out in April.
This means you gained’t must buy one of many new RTX GPUs to see the tech operating for your self, although there are a few caveats. Nvidia says RTX GPUs shall be two to a few instances quicker than GTX ones due to their RT cores.
GTX playing cards will as a substitute carry out ray tracing calculations akin to BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy), and ray / triangle intersection on their shader cores, which already deal with different duties in conventional rasterised rendering.
Using Metro Exodus for instance, Nvidia demonstrated how a lot slower Pascal GPUs are at ray tracing than Turing, even with the latter’s RT cores disabled. The screenshots under has the comparability, however remember the fact that DLSS is included within the third row.
DLSS is certainly a separate level of comparability within the subsequent set of pictures, which present efficiency in Metro Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Battlefield 5. As you’ll be able to see, even the highly effective 1080 Ti is considerably slower than an RTX 2080.
We already figured it was attainable for ray tracing to run on non-Turing GPUs after Crytek showed the tech running on AMD hardware, however it’s good to get official affirmation.
It’s additionally value retaining in thoughts that, as we famous above, not each single Pascal GPU will help ray tracing – solely GTX 1060 6GB and above.
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