NVIDIA Enabling DXR Support for Pascal and Newer GPUs in April Drivers

[Guest_Jim_*]

Today NVIDIA announced something that should make a number of people using its GPUs happy, at least if they are Pascal GPUs or newer. Since the first RTX GPUs were announced, it was only with them that one could enable RTX ray tracing effects, but in the April driver support for DXR will be enabled for Pascal GPUs from the GTX 1060 6 GB and up, and the two non-RTX Turing GPUs, the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti. Those with a Titan V, a Volta-based graphics card, will also get support.

DXR is Microsoft's DirectX Ray Tracing component for DirectX 12 and NVIDIA's RTX technology actually runs on top of it. Being a Microsoft technology, it is not so strictly limited to specific hardware, so not only are these older NVIDIA GPUs capable of it, but potentially AMD's GPUs too, if AMD ever chooses to enable it in the drivers. However, NVIDIA's RT Cores that accelerate the ray tracing work do provide a substantial performance increase, so while your GTX 10-series GPU may be able to enable ray traced effects after some patches, you cannot necessarily expect the performance to be very good. This will of course depend on the game and implementation. The GTX 10-series is going to be limited to running the calculations in FP32 mode, while the Turing-based GTX 16-series GPUs will also have INT32 to help with the calculations, so they can potentially be faster, at least at DXR. It may also be important to note that Pascal does not have Tensor cores, nor do the GTX Turing GPUs, and these are used for the denoising of the ray tracing results.

Alongside this announcement, NVIDIA also stated the first game to have DXR enabled will be Dragon Hound, an Asia-targeting MMO, but we can also expect Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and 3DMark's Port Royal benchmark to be updated with support. Both Unreal Engine and Unity will also get support for DXR, making it potentially very easy for developers to add it to games in the future. As both Epic Games and Unity will also be giving presentations this week, we can probably expect more from them before long.

Source: Anandtech

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[Boinker]

And the plot thickens.

[jdm_freek]

APRIL FOOLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Guest_Jim_*]

I wonder if this might push AMD to enable DXR across its GPUs too.

It will also be interesting to see quality comparisons, due to the lack of tensor-based denoising.

[jdm_freek]

Amd is said to have RT as well