NVIDIA Brings DX-R To Pascal GPUs with new driver (+some benchmarks)
It has been a topic of much and many debates, the RTX features from NVIDIA. Is hybrid ray tracing with the extra money, and why hasn’t the sole technology behind RTX, the DXR API been brought towards other cards. Well, today that changes with a driver release from NVIDIA.
You want to run Battlefield 5 or Metro Exodus with ray tracing enabled? You need a GeForce RTX card. The release of today’s driver opens up DXR support towards NVIDIA Pascal GPUs for the GeForce 1000 and 1660 (6GB and higher) series.
Above the GTX 1080 - the perf hit is very extensive.
There's a bit of a conundrum though, DXR technically only requires a DX12- or Vulkan-compatible graphics card with appropriate drivers, but the calculations for ray tracing will fall back to the GPU's compute capabilities and will invoke a big massive performance hit. The new driver released today makes it possible to use real-time raytracing in games via DXR as part of DirectX 12 without exclusive RT cores and thus utilizing the traditional compute cores. However, with DXR effects enabled, performance will be significantly lower than Turing's counterparts with specialized RT cores.
The GTX 1660 Ti actually holds ground pretty well when you compare it with that GTX 1080
NVIDIA has been working on DXR via compute shaders running over its CUDA (shader) cores. For recent GeForce GTX 1660 series cards adopters that means there will be a performance benefit as Turing includes separate INT32 cores which are not merged with FP32 cores as Pascal has), that means that the 1660 cards will run significantly better than the Series 1000 (Pascal). It still will take a massive perf hit as it obviously is still lacking RTX cores.
The dark-colored charts below derive from NVIDIA themselves. The benchmark results as presented by NVIDIA are fairly spot on to what we are seeing.
DLSS remains exclusively for Turing RTX
From now on Raytracing will no longer be available exclusively on GeForce RTX at Nvidia. But with DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) it is different. The alternative AI-based antialiasing will continue to be provided only with the dedicated tensor cores of the RTX family, Nvidia said in a Q & A.
So in short, people can enable DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and higher graphics cards via a Game Ready Driver update, expected in April. DLSS, no bueno.
Below you can see a number of slides with perf numbers that NVIDIA made, we have had no early driver to test this. In the course of today, we’ll run some numbers internally on our side and will add these towards this article. So, to be updated. The bad news is that Raytracing performance will suck on non RTX supported cards, the good news is that you can now visually check whether or not you like RTX Raytracing in your games, and can decide whether or not this is something for your upgrade path. For some good news, NVIDIA will be making three demos available today as well, the Star Wars reflections demo, the Justice tech demo and the Atomic Heart Tech demo which should be a really nice demo to play around with and immerse yourself in a raytraced environment.
Meanwhile, you can download and try the new driver here.
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Senior Member
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So they are releasing these drivers to show that all other cards (besides RTX series) suck in Ray Tracing? lol
If only I could see more difference with RTX On than with (for example) PhysX On but not with 90% performance loss...

I know I know in NVidia demos Ray Tracing will be more visible and detailed :p
Senior Member
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I installed the drive but cant see an option to enable RTX on Metro Exodus - why?
Senior Member
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Probably because games will have to support it too for other GPUs, so patches will be needed if game developers will be nice enough

Also latest Windows 10 (1809+) will be needed for sure.
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People with a 1660 or Pascal cards shouldn't expect expect to run raytracing like an RTX card but they could have an extra option to play with. Like messing with settings at 1080p or game studios playing with lower level raytracing techniques to add some extra features here and there for all cards. It opens up a world of options but its not a miracle solution. Even for a 2080ti it's an added option. For folks that bought the 2080ti's they were fully aware it was an option/feature but the compute for regular gaming was also higher than any 10xx series card. The price was the only real hurdle.
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lol even the 1080ti is dying trying to run it.