NVIDIA Extends DirectX Raytracing (DXR) Support to Many GeForce GTX GPUs

[bug]

It’s not an about face. It’s a clever move by Nvidia to show that the top Pascal card can only do RTX barely, at a playable FPS.

It’s meant to convince the hesitant people to get RTX cards after they see what their Pascal’s cannot or can only barely do.

I believe this is a try-before-you-buy move. You can at least fire up an RTX enabled title or demo and check whether you deem it worthy before shelling out the $$$ for Turing.
Also, it seems to have flown under eveybody's radar, but these drivers seem to also have enabled Vulkan RTX.

 

[HellZaQ]

Yeah, at 10fps...

10-15 FPS on GTX 1070Ti, res 1080p all high.

Did you try it?
Honest question.

Edit:
The new set of drivers has DXR implementation, that is DirectX 12.
I really do not know if Nvidia actually made the Vulkan stuff Q2VKRT uses to work on non-RTX hardware. Probably not as Vulkan's extensions should be low-level enough.

About 15FPS on my GPU, but looks very good

 

[Crackong]

You might want to reconsider that and look back to how successful Ageia PPU were at the beginning.

But there were more games that support PhysX at the beginning of PhysX launch.
Not just 3 , right ?

 

[biffzinker]

My RTX 2060 ran the Atomic Heart demo better than I expected with or without DLSS. The RTRT is impressive but I'm not sure it's worth the performance impact incurred.

 

[Fluffmeister]

It would be nice if AMD added DXR support to their relevant GPUs too, but maybe they don't want to sell more Turing RTX cards either.

 

[Crackong]

It would be nice if AMD added DXR support to their relevant GPUs too, but maybe they don't want to sell more Turing RTX cards either.

I highly doubt that.
Did FreeSync help selling more G-Sync monitors?

 

[Fluffmeister]

I highly doubt that.
Did FreeSync help selling more G-Sync monitors?

Yes, a shit ton of shit Freesync monitors achieved nothing, beyond creating a market for Nvidia come in a gobble up.

Well played Nvidia, well played.

 

[HossHuge]

Did anyone else go and check the price of a GTX 1060 6 GB ?

 

[Crackong]

Yes, a shit ton of shit Freesync monitors achieved nothing, beyond creating a market for Nvidia come in a gobble up.

Well played Nvidia, well played.

But G-Sync monitors did not benefit from that, right?
Same case.
If AMD come up with something let's say "FreeRay" which runs on and optimized for typical graphics cards instead of RTX cards, would that benefit RTX card sales ?

Nope

.

 

[SIGSEGV]

lol.
DoA

pathetic

 

[GreiverBlade]

it's not like DXR is something ... since it impair the fps on the 20XX series .... it's kinda unwanted on 10XX ... even if it's an option ... what's the point of an option that make the card run like sh!t (also .... since the current gen run like sh!t too with it ... double framerate ... but still sh!t ) ohhhh wait... to make the user believe that their card is obsolete and they need a new gen ... well that might work with some...

more stone to the castle of : "i wait next gen GPU's"

 

[TheLostSwede]

But there were more games that support PhysX at the beginning of PhysX launch.
Not just 3 , right ?

No and yes. I think many people forget that PhysX isn't Nvidia technology, it was initially developed by a Swiss university spin-off and then bought by Ageia that made the first PPU cards. As such, there were a handful of games that supported it long before Nvidia got involved and bout Ageia. Nvidia bought Ageia four years in, which makes a huge difference in terms of software support, whereas this is the first widely available ray tracing hardware available for consumers. There have been several earlier attempts, but none have been a commercial success. Caustic Graphics were the closest, but for whatever reason, Imagination Technologies shut them down a year or so after acquiring them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray-tracing_hardware#Implementations

 

[bug]

I highly doubt that.
Did FreeSync help selling more G-Sync monitors?

Different situation. Freesync is an alternative to G-Sync, whereas another implementation of DXR only increases exposure of the API.

 

[SoNic67]

I have installed the drivers and I am sad that I didn't see an option for RTX similar with the one for PhysX - to dedicate another video card just for that function (RTX).
In the past I was able to use a weaker GTX960 in games that have PhysX (Fallout 4, Metro 2033) with help of another GT740 dedicated to PhysX. During games, I could monitor the usage on both cards with GPU-Z and I saw it working nicelly.

A similar approach for RTX would allow people like me, that already own a GTX1080, to get into using RTX by just adding another 1060 or 1660, dedicated to that.

I guess nvidia's intent was not to make the technology truly usable, but just to frustrate us and hopefully in this way make us buy the new RTX cards.
That's not gonna work and actually I think will be generating a backlash against RTX adoption by the game developers.

 

[bug]

@SoNic67 Just think of the amount of data that would need to be transferred between the cards if one would do the rendering and the other one the lighting. And keep in mind weaker cards don't support SLI anymore.

 

[SoNic67]

@bug Based on the amount of CUDA calculations involved, I think that the bottleneck will be in the GPU cores trying to process RTX, not in the PCIe bus.

PCI Express 3.0's 8 GT/s bit rate effectively delivers 985 MB/s per lane. With two x16 slots... I think is enough.
Or heck, if there are too high latencies, they could finaly use the NVLink for something useful for a change, because SLI never scaled right... I'll get a 1070 if needed. They are so proud of that link...

PS: Or just cut to the cheese and, similar with how they released a Turing card without the RTX cores, release a card that has only those cores, like a co-processor, for us that want to upgrade without paying $1000.

 

[Ruru]

I can't see any difference between ray tracing or not.

 

[BorgOvermind]

So another check-box for my 1070 that does absolutely nothing. 'Great.'

 

[bug]

I can't see any difference between ray tracing or not.

If you were trying to mix off topic with irrelevant, you have nailed it.

 

[Fluffmeister]

I can't see any difference between ray tracing or not.

I believe ray tracing turns a round object into a hexagon.

 

[Crackong]

Different situation. Freesync is an alternative to G-Sync, whereas another implementation of DXR only increases exposure of the API.

Nvidia does not own DXR.
If AMD could come up with their own solution to optimize DXR without dedicated "cores", RTX cards would become utterly pointless.

 

[Slizzo]

More like developer interest has been...nonexistent...and they're hoping expanding support will spur more developer interest. I think developers seeing these numbers will laugh and walk away.

It’s not an about face. It’s a clever move by Nvidia to show that the top Pascal card can only do RTX barely, at a playable FPS.

It’s meant to convince the hesitant people to get RTX cards after they see what their Pascal’s cannot or can only barely do.

It only sort of meant to do that.

What it REALLY is for, is to allow developers that don't have RTX cards to get in and start developing for RTX and allow them to see their results before releasing the features to the masses in their games. Going from a very small install base of developers to a considerably large install base, means that you have more people developing for DXR and Vulkan Ray Tracing than you had before.

 

[bug]

Nvidia does not own DXR.
If AMD could come up with their own solution to optimize DXR without dedicated "cores", RTX cards would become utterly pointless.

Maybe so, but how is that relevant to this context?

 

[Crackong]

Maybe so, but how is that relevant to this context?

If AMD not doing something, we will keep getting these "Demo..Demo...Demo..Demo...Where are the actual GAMES???" situation.
It has been 7 months, only 3 games supporting this "Just works" technology and none of them fully supports all DXR effects in a single game.

 

[bug]

If AMD not doing something, we will keep getting these "Demo..Demo...Demo..Demo...Where are the actual GAMES???" situation.
It has been 7 months, only 3 games supporting this "Just works" technology and none of them fully supports all DXR effects in a single game.

You must be young. Every single gfx technology that came before this took years till developers learned how to use it properly, RTX/DXR is no different. Also, no game supports all effects in DX12 or DX11 or DX10, so I don't see how supporting everything DXR can do is relevant.
And again, this is not a discussion to have in a thread about RTX being sort of supported on Pascal cards.