MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Armor 8G review - Realtime Raytracing performance

Realtime Raytracing performance

One of the most frustrating things of this review series is that we cannot show you any game demos that support DirectX Raytracing, and thus for that matter anything with RT cores enabled. While a dozen or so games are underway that will get support, the simple fact remains that none of them have been released.

Ergo we cannot show you the game performance of the RT cores. However, NVIDIA has provided the Star Wars Reflections Elevator Raytracing Demo and I sneakily ran and recorded here in my lab at Ultra HD. The video below is recorded with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

You do need to grasp a couple of things, reflections is a cinematic demo created in a collaboration between Epic Games, ILMxLAB and NVIDIA to achieve film quality at 1080p on 4 Tesla V100s, each with 16 GB of framebuffer. This Turing graphics card is running it as a single GPU with half the GPU memory. In the video you'll notice that once I unlock the 24 FPS cap, we hover in the 30 to 35 FPS ranges. The above was recorded at Ultra HD and one RTX 20780 Ti card my friends.

3DMark Dandia - Real-time Raytracing

We have a bit of an exclusive here. Meet the upcoming RT enabled 3DMark Dandia from UL (formerly Futuremark), this 3DMark tech demo shows real-time ray tracing in action. The demo is based on a new 3DMark benchmark test that they plan to release later this year. The demo will run on any hardware with drivers that support the Microsoft DirectX Ray Tracing API. The purpose of this demo is to show practical, real-time applications of the Microsoft DirectX Ray Tracing API.

The demo does not contain all the ray tracing effects that will be present in the final benchmark, nor is it fully optimized. so it cannot be used to measure or compare GPU performance in a meaningful way. The demo is based on a work in progress.