NVIDIA Titan V Raytraces Battelfield V in RTX mode at proper perf (but does not have any RT cores).

It is a bit of a remarkable story really, but users have enabled RTX mode on a Nvidia Titan V, which works quite well and performs as fast as the RTX 2080 Ti. Titan V, however, is Volta, and Volta does not have any RT cores.

Of course, Volta is a very powerful card with loads of headroom and tensor cores. DX-R mode enabled, in theory, can work on any compatible DirectX 12 graphics card as long as it is fast enough, as the DirectX Raytracing is merely an extension to the DX12 API. If the hardware is not supported, it could run it in a software modus. However, the findings raise the question, are dedicated RT in hardware cores actually needed? 

In the example, the Titan V with a Volta GV100 GPU according to users in this thread over at 3dcenter, would produce framerates that are almost equal to those of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. One user reports 69 fps in Ultra HD resolution at set Ultra high with both cards. Both graphics cards have been overclocked and cooled with water cooling with equal framerates and image quality. Yet another user reports he was playing in a 60-100 fps at 1440p ultra with 80 fps average. In our own review, the RTX 2080 Ti with DXR raytracing averaged 84.3 fps which is pretty damn close towards our results as tested in our Battlefield V article.

These new findings do make us wonder what the actual effect of RT has on performance. It has to be stated, these are merely user reports and we cannot verify any test methodologies used here (testing in an RT enhanced environment would be one concern that comes to mind).

Regardless, these are interesting find but for now, please do take them with caution and a few grains of salt. Below two settings screenshot the users used, as well as a screengrab with RTX enabled on the Volta card.