# Grab the Stunning "Attic" NVIDIA RTX + DLSS Unreal Engine Interactive Demo, Works on even AMD



## btarunr (Apr 19, 2021)

We are hosting the NVIDIA "Attic" RTX + DLSS interactive tech-demo in our Downloads section. Developed on Unreal Engine 4, the demo puts you in the bunny-slippers of a little girl playing around in her attic. This is no normal attic, it's her kingdom, complete with stuff to build a pillow fort, an old CRT TV playing retro NVIDIA commercials, a full-length mirror, really cool old stuff, and decorations. You can explore the place in a first-person perspective. 

The interactive demo is brought to life with on-the-fly controls for RTX real-time raytracing and its various features, DLSS performance enhancement, a frame-rate counter, and controls for time-of-day, which alters lighting in the room. The demo shows off raytraced reflections, translucency, global-illumination, direct-illumination, and DLSS. You also get cool gadgets such as the "light cannon" or a reflective orb, that let you play around with dynamic lighting some more. To use this demo, you'll need a machine with an RTX 20-series "Turing" or RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics card, and Windows 10. The demo also works on Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. Grab it from the link below.

*DOWNLOAD:* NVIDIA Unreal Engine 4 RTX & DLSS Demo 





*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## Legacy-ZA (Apr 19, 2021)

Let me just launch... oh, wait...


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## Prima.Vera (Apr 19, 2021)

RTX blurs the shadows too much and also adds a lot of moving noise to them??


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## Vayra86 (Apr 19, 2021)

Sorry but no.

RTX = OFF & DLSS = OFF

Its going to take a serious price slash before its on, Huang. And since you'll be peddling Ampere for the next three generations apparently, I'm sure you can manage that.

Still, cool demo.


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## TheinsanegamerN (Apr 19, 2021)

Delicious blur, and I love how one lighting effect tanks the framerate to PS3 level! TRUELY CINEMATIC!

I can do this on my vega 64, It's called "running at 720p".


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## Vayra86 (Apr 19, 2021)

Prima.Vera said:


> RTX blurs the shadows too much and also adds a lot of moving noise to them??


LOL.

That's proof right there that RTX is total BS.

The RTX Off pic has much more fidelity to it, AND seems more correct in the scene. Blurred shadows from a window pane at such a short distance? Nope. With a strong light, that's going to be a very clear shadow like it shows in RTX Off.

TL DR We can make raster precooked stuff better than we can brute force it in real time.
*Duh.*
Games have already showed us this fact, too. Its not fully dynamic. But does it _need _to be? And at the same time, the implementation of RT here shows us that its entirely, still, up to developers setting stuff right for calculations to work out correctly. Hmm.... tomato tomatoe?


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## TheinsanegamerN (Apr 19, 2021)

Vayra86 said:


> LOL.
> 
> That's proof right there that RTX is total BS.
> 
> ...


The only reason it NEEDS to be dynamically rendered is so nvidia has a new measurement to judge their cards against, because we've gotten to the point of good enough for every resolution except 4k at this point.


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## HaiKarate (Apr 19, 2021)

It runs on my GTX 1070 so you don't *need* an RTX card to run it. I can even turn on ray tracing, although it drops the framerate down to 3 fps.


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## Vayra86 (Apr 19, 2021)

TheinsanegamerN said:


> The only reason it NEEDS to be dynamically rendered is so nvidia has a new measurement to judge their cards against, because we've gotten to the point of good enough for every resolution except 4k at this point.



Amen. This is the only explanation that makes sense. Brute forcing was, is and has always been the most ineffective way to approach a problem. Its reserved for when you have no better tricks to get there.

Rasterized was in fact the trick we figured out. RT is a step back.

In that sense its almost like a fashion statement... those keep doing the rounds every ten or twenty odd years too. I guess the pandemic is good for one thing. Some sense of realism and the realization this RT move is way beyond our paycheck, while hardly being any better anyway.


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## Chomiq (Apr 19, 2021)

Let me just launch it on my non-existing current gen GPU - oh wait.


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## Vendor (Apr 19, 2021)

Vayra86 said:


> LOL.
> 
> That's proof right there that RTX is total BS.
> 
> ...


true, Shadow Warrior 2 has decent water reflections which look as good as RT


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## Aquinus (Apr 19, 2021)

btarunr said:


> The demo also works on Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs.


RTX On?


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## Vayra86 (Apr 19, 2021)

Vendor said:


> true, Shadow Warrior 2 has decent water reflections which look as good as RT



Water reflections and reflections in any case were already a holy grail that was found.

Oh no its limited to screen space. So we can't see what's off-screen! Imagine marketing that. You have to come up with BS like 10 Gigarays to make it just work. Oh.. 

At least one quote rang true after all:

'The more you buy, the more you save'.
Jensen knew it all along, mining was about to get accelerated.


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## Mescalamba (Apr 19, 2021)

Prima.Vera said:


> RTX blurs the shadows too much and also adds a lot of moving noise to them??


In absence of light, noise prevails.

Apart that, reality doesnt have much sharp defined shadows, unless your light source is really sharp too.

That noise is there cause there is light used to create image, and in shadow there isnt light.. sooo. Noise.


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## windwhirl (Apr 19, 2021)

I'll just repeat myself from sometime ago:

"RT... It's a "nice to have", mostly because we had already reached an acceptable level of quality with all the previous features that RT is replacing/complementing, like SSR. I mean, sure, you can push for more realism with RT, but it's not the massive jump that some people say it is. Or at least, I'm not seeing it.

Frankly, if given a choice, I'd drop RT and get obscenely high-quality textures."


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## Kohl Baas (Apr 19, 2021)

Aquinus said:


> RTX On?


You can't turn RTX on or off, because it's the naming of nVidia's RT-capable videocards.

You can only turn RT-effects On or Off. Effects that are mostly based on DXR.


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## elghinnarisa (Apr 19, 2021)

I still dont like how DLSS makes things look, everything look so grainy so.... old? It's like everything has a mesh of static over it, just ever so lightly making large parts of it seem fuzzy and adding a lot of aliasing.
Though the less of the effects that are used, the better it looks. If I leave just translucency and toggle DLSS on or off, its pretty decent.


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## Chomiq (Apr 19, 2021)

Mescalamba said:


> In absence of light, noise prevails.
> 
> Apart that, reality doesnt have much sharp defined shadows, unless your light source is really sharp too.
> 
> That noise is there cause there is light used to create image, and in shadow there isnt light.. sooo. Noise.


More likely RT is done with lower number of rays (possibly at lower resolution) and denoiser isn't doing a great job with handling this. Not to mention that DLSS is also active with RT ON so this will also introduce noise as image is no longer rendered at native resolution. For DLSS to look good you need a high enough sample rate, so that's why image quality takes a big hit once you go down from the 4K which is usually used for comparisons.


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## Chris34 (Apr 19, 2021)

DLSS upscale to 1080p looks ugly.


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## medi01 (Apr 19, 2021)

What about uneven AMD? Does it work on it?

I was told this runs on both even and uneven AMD GPUs. Not sure bout TXes:


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## Cr4zy (Apr 19, 2021)

All the people in here complaining about ray tracing like it's supposed to work perfectly and run at no performance cost the day it was added. Yeah we get it rasterization came a long way in years of work, no matter how you look at it ray tracing is the future, there are no ifs or buts about it. It's new tech, it's the future of game visuals, just like every other big new thing thats been added to games, it hurt performance but rasterization wouldnt be where it was today if someone went "who needs *fancy new tech* when you can just use *standard old tech*?" These things are and will continue to be toggleable features in games, yet somehow everyone is still crying about the performance impact they have.


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## FreedomEclipse (Apr 19, 2021)

I guess they allowed AMD to get in on it so that they have more ammo to dunk on them with --- Because its no secret that AMDs current cards dont handle RTX/DLSS very well.


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## StefanM (Apr 19, 2021)

HaiKarate said:


> It runs on my GTX 1070 so you don't *need* an RTX card to run it. I can even turn on ray tracing, although it drops the framerate down to 3 fps.


Yeah, same here with GTX 1060
Do you see yourself in the mirror?

FYI:
_On Pascal-architecture GPUs, we see that ray tracing and all other graphics rendering tasks are handled by FP32 Pascal shader cores. This takes longer to perform, meaning the gamer encounters a lower framerate._
Source: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gtx-dxr-ray-tracing-available-now/


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## GerKNG (Apr 19, 2021)

Aquinus said:


> RTX On?


yeah why not?


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## evernessince (Apr 20, 2021)

TheinsanegamerN said:


> The only reason it NEEDS to be dynamically rendered is so nvidia has a new measurement to judge their cards against, because we've gotten to the point of good enough for every resolution except 4k at this point.



I'd highly disagree, especially since 240 Hz is moving up to 1440p and 360 Hz up to 1080p.  If Cyberpunk 2077 is an indication of how demanding upcoming titles will be, you don't need to come up with ways to spend a ton of processing power.  Devs are more than capable of using what they are given.



Cr4zy said:


> All the people in here complaining about ray tracing like it's supposed to work perfectly and run at no performance cost the day it was added. Yeah we get it rasterization came a long way in years of work, no matter how you look at it ray tracing is the future, there are no ifs or buts about it. It's new tech, it's the future of game visuals, just like every other big new thing thats been added to games, it hurt performance but rasterization wouldnt be where it was today if someone went "who needs *fancy new tech* when you can just use *standard old tech*?" These things are and will continue to be toggleable features in games, yet somehow everyone is still crying about the performance impact they have.



Noting the performance impact is an important point to make.  Complaining about others pointing that fact out is not.  IMO RTX isn't really worth it until you start getting movie like quality.  RTX shadows are really really not worth the performance impact and their visual benefit is very subjective.  It's not a definite improvement.  RTX reflections do look nice but unfortunately for them, recent updates to game engines have made those exact effects possible via rasterization just as dynamic.  There's a massive gap between where we are now and where RT performance needs to be in order to get the quality jump people expect when you imply ray tracing.  At 30% a generation, you are looking a decades before we get full modern RT games.  Even full RT minecraft has to use a fraction of the default render distance to get reasonable performance.


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## KainXS (Apr 20, 2021)

Besides the whining about RTX, this looks like a good alternative for testing overclocks besides using Unigine Heaven. I will probably use it for that from now on.


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## wolf (Apr 20, 2021)

Gave it a go at 3440x1440 on an RTX3080, looks really nice, very natural, cozy and dynamic. DLSS at this resolution works a charm too.


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## Minus Infinity (Apr 20, 2021)

Ray tracing just sucks, not sure why they insist on using this garbage tech. Beam tracing is the future and doesn't have the problems with noise.
Rays are artificial constructs, they contain no physics at all, so everthing you see like colour and refraction etc is a hack. Beams are actual solutions of a simplified Maxwell equation and thus contain all the physics you require. Things like refraction, diffraction, colour etc are all inherent properties of the beam. Alos rather than needing hundreds of millions of rays to build up a scene with low noise, you only need a few hundred beams. I know this for a fact. because I worked for a large camera company on a beam tracing program and it was vastly better than Ray tracing. You can get the actual colour of objects by just supplying the correct refractive index, you get the same resolution from as little as 200 beams, all the physics falls out naturally, no hacks no fudges. You don't have to solve the Helmholtz equation on the fly, you just need to beams that are valid solutions of this equation as your input. You could design your hardware to have improved fp32 and it would be no more taxing than for RT. If you think this is just abstract, there are commercial beam tracing programs for lens design like Code V and beam tracing is used extensively in radar and underwater acoustics.

Brain dead to still be using RT in an era of such powerful hardware.


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## watzupken (Apr 20, 2021)

evernessince said:


> I'd highly disagree, especially since 240 Hz is moving up to 1440p and 360 Hz up to 1080p.  If Cyberpunk 2077 is an indication of how demanding upcoming titles will be, you don't need to come up with ways to spend a ton of processing power.  Devs are more than capable of using what they are given.
> 
> 
> 
> Noting the performance impact is an important point to make.  Complaining about others pointing that fact out is not.  IMO RTX isn't really worth it until you start getting movie like quality.  RTX shadows are really really not worth the performance impact and their visual benefit is very subjective.  It's not a definite improvement.  RTX reflections do look nice but unfortunately for them, recent updates to game engines have made those exact effects possible via rasterization just as dynamic.  There's a massive gap between where we are now and where RT performance needs to be in order to get the quality jump people expect when you imply ray tracing.  At 30% a generation, you are looking a decades before we get full modern RT games.  Even full RT minecraft has to use a fraction of the default render distance to get reasonable performance.


On the first point, I do want to point out that most people won't bother to run a game like CyberPunk at 240 or 360 Hz because it doesn't matter to them. These are usually used by competitive gamers for the minute advantage they can get. But I agree that game developers will start pushing the envelop when it comes to utilising the hardware available. 

RTX is a nice to have feature, but in my personal opinion, is not required for most. The fact is that most people won't realise the difference with or without RT if they start gaming at very high graphic quality without RT. Its only when you have a side by side comparison will most notice the difference. The performance delta with and without RT is too wide, and to be honest, I rather play with high frame rates and smooth frame pacing. While most people will fall back to DLSS, but they need to be aware as well that DLSS is not available in every game release now. In the past, any games with RT will automatically come with DLSS at launch because it will be an Nvidia exclusive title. Now that RT is not limited to Nvidia hardware, we've seen cases where DLSS may not be available on day 1 or for some time after the game is released. Existing hardware can barely keep up with the RT requirements without some sorts of upscaling technology, and I am really not expecting the hardware to catch up anytime soon.


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## r.h.p (Apr 20, 2021)

the bouncing light balls are cool , interactive is cool 1440 p was 30fps no rtx  

im not sure what the idea is the room looks cheesy not stunning imo .Maybe rtx helps i wont know ...


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## Prima.Vera (Apr 20, 2021)

Minus Infinity said:


> Ray tracing just sucks, not sure why they insist on using this garbage tech. Beam tracing is the future and doesn't have the problems with noise.
> Rays are artificial constructs, they contain no physics at all, so everthing you see like colour and refraction etc is a hack. Beams are actual solutions of a simplified Maxwell equation and thus contain all the physics you require. Things like refraction, diffraction, colour etc are all inherent properties of the beam. Alos rather than needing hundreds of millions of rays to build up a scene with low noise, you only need a few hundred beams. I know this for a fact. because I worked for a large camera company on a beam tracing program and it was vastly better than Ray tracing. You can get the actual colour of objects by just supplying the correct refractive index, you get the same resolution from as little as 200 beams, all the physics falls out naturally, no hacks no fudges. You don't have to solve the Helmholtz equation on the fly, you just need to beams that are valid solutions of this equation as your input. You could design your hardware to have improved fp32 and it would be no more taxing than for RT. If you think this is just abstract, there are commercial beam tracing programs for lens design like Code V and beam tracing is used extensively in radar and underwater acoustics.
> 
> Brain dead to still be using RT in an era of such powerful hardware.


Interesting. Are there any demos or comparison apps ?


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## sam_86314 (Apr 20, 2021)

Ran it on my R9 280. While lots of features clearly don't work on this card, it still ran at around 24 FPS with everything on at 1080p. 

Also, the mirrors looked like crap because of the reflections only being screen-space.


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## evernessince (Apr 20, 2021)

watzupken said:


> On the first point, I do want to point out that most people won't bother to run a game like CyberPunk at 240 or 360 Hz because it doesn't matter to them. These are usually used by competitive gamers for the minute advantage they can get. But I agree that game developers will start pushing the envelop when it comes to utilising the hardware available.
> 
> RTX is a nice to have feature, but in my personal opinion, is not required for most. The fact is that most people won't realise the difference with or without RT if they start gaming at very high graphic quality without RT. Its only when you have a side by side comparison will most notice the difference. The performance delta with and without RT is too wide, and to be honest, I rather play with high frame rates and smooth frame pacing. While most people will fall back to DLSS, but they need to be aware as well that DLSS is not available in every game release now. In the past, any games with RT will automatically come with DLSS at launch because it will be an Nvidia exclusive title. Now that RT is not limited to Nvidia hardware, we've seen cases where DLSS may not be available on day 1 or for some time after the game is released. Existing hardware can barely keep up with the RT requirements without some sorts of upscaling technology, and I am really not expecting the hardware to catch up anytime soon.



You are conflating two points I was making.  First, the fact that higher refresh rates are available at high resolutions and second that game requirements are increasing.

Those are separate, not combined as indicated.


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## semitope (Apr 20, 2021)

That's funny. This is more what I expect unreal engine to look like. Not those fancy tech demos from the past. Looks like a classic unreal engine game. Aptly named engine


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## mharbinger (Apr 20, 2021)

Fun demo to mess around with.  I liked being able to adjust the time of day and play with the different "guns" and such.

Looked awful when I tried to run it at 3440x1440 with DLSS, for whatever reason.  Turning that off looked great.  Switching to windowed 16:9 1440p fixed DLSS.  Weird.

Running with a 3700X and a 2080 Ti, so not the latest and greatest tech.  Still got 60-72 FPS with all the toggles on.

Certainly not the most impressive RTX showcase I've seen, though.  So far that is still Control.


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## dogwitch (Apr 20, 2021)

just watch end game.
gold standard for what  is global illumination


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## 0x4452 (Apr 20, 2021)

Two types of comments here.

1. DLSS / RT sucks. (oh and btw, I have a potato PC)
2. Good showcase of the new technologies and what's about to come in the future. (oh and btw, I have 2070 or newer GPU)


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## Fierce Guppy (Apr 20, 2021)

Minus Infinity said:


> Ray tracing just sucks, not sure why they insist on using this garbage tech. Beam tracing is the future and doesn't have the problems with noise.
> Rays are artificial constructs, they contain no physics at all, so everthing you see like colour and refraction etc is a hack. Beams are actual solutions of a simplified Maxwell equation and thus contain all the physics you require. Things like refraction, diffraction, colour etc are all inherent properties of the beam. Alos rather than needing hundreds of millions of rays to build up a scene with low noise, you only need a few hundred beams. I know this for a fact. because I worked for a large camera company on a beam tracing program and it was vastly better than Ray tracing. You can get the actual colour of objects by just supplying the correct refractive index, you get the same resolution from as little as 200 beams, all the physics falls out naturally, no hacks no fudges. You don't have to solve the Helmholtz equation on the fly, you just need to beams that are valid solutions of this equation as your input. You could design your hardware to have improved fp32 and it would be no more taxing than for RT. If you think this is just abstract, there are commercial beam tracing programs for lens design like Code V and beam tracing is used extensively in radar and underwater acoustics.
> 
> Brain dead to still be using RT in an era of such powerful hardware.



Well then if it is computationally far less expensive, then join the nvidia developer forum and tell devs how it's supposed to be done.  Or AMD.... whomever.


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## GamerGuy (Apr 21, 2021)

FreedomEclipse said:


> I guess they allowed AMD to get in on it so that they have more ammo to dunk on them with --- Because its no secret that AMDs current cards dont handle RTX/DLSS very well.


Eh, aren't RTX/DLSS an nVidia thing or am I wrong?

Just funning with ya, I think I know what you mean, I'm just hoping that FidelityFX Super Resolution would, at the very least, improve gaming with RT enabled to a more comfortable level.


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## dogwitch (Apr 21, 2021)

GamerGuy said:


> Eh, aren't RTX/DLSS an nVidia thing or am I wrong?
> 
> Just funning with ya, I think I know what you mean, I'm just hoping that FidelityFX Super Resolution would, at the very least, improve gaming with RT enabled to a more comfortable level.


its a team green term for ray tracing.


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## gedster (Apr 23, 2021)

hmm.....did anyone try this demo at 2160p??
it looks fine to me.
I ran RTX_Showcase-Win64-Shipping.exe from the RTX Technology Showcase/Binaries/Win64 folder.

this offers 2160p option.....


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## Fierce Guppy (Apr 25, 2021)

gedster said:


> hmm.....did anyone try this demo at 2160p??
> it looks fine to me.
> I ran RTX_Showcase-Win64-Shipping.exe from the RTX Technology Showcase/Binaries/Win64 folder.
> 
> this offers 2160p option.....


It offers nothing above the monitor's native resolution, which for me is 1440.   What got me moist for a few minutes was finding VR controller bindings in one of the subfolders.  However, I now think they're just leftovers from the Unreal 4 engine dev tools.  Even if the demo had VR capability, it would not look as amazing as the VR demo in the Superposition benchmark ( which has no RT ).  The guy who made  it is clearly extremely talented.

For this demo I was interested in how a 3080 & a 1080 Ti would handle it.  Settings default, full screen, RTX label and side panel hidden (Using MSI Afterburner for the FPS counter ), not moving from initial location, day/night slider centred.
1440:  RT on 99-100 fps
1440:  DLSS off 44
1440:  RT off  86 <--- Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuug!!!! 
1080:  RT on 114-115 fps
1080:  DLSS off 93 
1080:  RT off 139-141

For a 1080 Ti with an FHD monitor attached.
1080: RT on  9 fps
1080: RT off  75-76 fps


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