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NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Tech Will Soon Run On Older GTX Cards (engadget.com) 98

Posted by BeauHD from the what's-old-is-new dept.
NVIDIA's older GeForce GTX 10-series cards will be getting the company's new ray-tracing tech in April. The technology, which is currently only available on its new RTX cards, "will work on GPUs from the 1060 and up, albeit with some serious caveats," reports Engadget. "Some games like Battlefield V will run just fine and deliver better visuals, but other games, like the freshly released Metro Exodus, will run at just 18 fps at 1440p -- obviously an unplayable frame-rate." From the report: What games you'll be able to play with ray-tracing tech (also known as DXR) on NVIDIA GTX cards depends entirely on how it's implemented. In Battlefield V, for instance, the tech is only used for things like reflections. On top of that, you can dial down the strength of the effect so that it consumes less computing horsepower. Metro Exodus, on the other hand, uses ray tracing to create highly realistic "global illumination" effects, simulating lighting from the real world. It's the first game that really showed the potential of RTX cards and actually generated some excitement about the tech. However, because it's so computationally intensive, GTX cards (which don't have the RTX tensor cores) will be effectively be too slow to run it.

NVIDIA explained that when it was first developing the next gen RTX tech, it found chips using Pascal tech would be "monster" sized and consume up to 650 watts. That's because the older cards lack both the integer cores and tensor cores found on the RTX cards. They get particularly stuck on ray-tracing, running about four times slower than the RTX cards on Metro Exodus. Since Metro Exodus is so heavily ray-traced, the RTX cards run it three times quicker than older GTX 10-series cards. However, that falls to two times for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and 1.6 times for Battlefield V, because both of those games use ray tracing less. The latest GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti GPUs, which don't have RT but do have integer cores, will run ray-traced games moderately better than last-gen 10-series GPUs. NVIDIA also announced that Unity and Unreal Engine now support ray-tracing, allowing developers to implement the tech into their games. Developers can use NVIDIA's new set of tools called GameWorks RTX to achieve this.

"It includes the RTX Denoiser SDK that enables real-time ray-tracing through techniques that reduce the required ray count and number of samples per pixel," adds Engadget. "It will support ray-traced effects like area light shadows, glossy reflections, ambient occlusion and diffuse global illumination (the latter is used in Metro Exodus). Suffice to say, all of those things will make game look a lot prettier."
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NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Tech Will Soon Run On Older GTX Cards More

NVIDIA's Ray Tracing Tech Will Soon Run On Older GTX Cards

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  • LOL (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What kind of admission is this!?

  • I remember them doing this with phsyx (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday March 18, 2019 @10:28PM (#58296020)
    for my old GTX 240. It sucks. Some games wouldn't let you turn it off, and since there was no hardware acceleration it all ran on my CPU. I was running a GTX 240, you can bet my CPU couldn't do physx.

    By all accounts Ray Tracing already cuts framerates in half. I can't imagine a world where this works.

    • By all accounts Ray Tracing already cuts framerates in half. I can't imagine a world where this works.

      Imagine a world where what works, raytracing on an old GPU? Some of us have 1080 Tis and 60Hz 1080p panels. If a modern game cut ray tracing in half we'd go from a hard 60fps to a hard 60fps. But you're right for the majority of gamers this won't work.

      However I'm hopeful for some kind of granularity. So far there are two games on the market with raytracing enabled. One game has gone through an optimisation process where the visual quality not only improved but the frame rates increased by about 30-40% (Batt

    • Not all games need to be fast pace twitch action games. Some games can focus more on graphics detail, vs high frame rates. Also for the cut-scenes, They can be custom rendered in semi-real time, to give a cut scene customizable to the action at hand. having your character in the right spot. That item you had destroyed will show its current state.

      Also to a point, just because you don't want to upgrade, why should game designers try to stick so far behind that waiting for that one guy to upgrade.

    • So, in other words, not enough people upgraded to the new RTX series video cards yet so they need to cripple the existing GTX series cards with a driver "update" that forces real time ray tracing down everyone's throats whether or not their card can support it.

      I guess that's one way to make sure that they hit their 2019 earnings estimates. Bastards. Damn, I can't wait until Intel releases their own graphics cards and gives these guys some real product competition.

      • So, in other words, not enough people upgraded to the new RTX series video cards yet so they need to cripple the existing GTX series cards with a driver "update" that forces real time ray tracing down everyone's throats whether or not their card can support it.

        Don't be daft, you can't enable ray tracing through a driver update. There is a long and complicated process getting games to support it and 100% of both games that support it offer it to be disabled due to crippling the performance of the games.

        Calm down, drink a beer, and realise that for the long history of people accusing NVIDIA and AMD of crippling older cards through driver updates it has been proven completely false time and time again.

        • Don't be daft, you can't enable ray tracing through a driver update.

          I'm pretty sure you can; these are programmable GPU's. You just shouldn't expect to enable efficient ray-tracing.

          • No you missed my point. NVIDIA can't force a game without raytracing to suddenly have raytracing. That is something that is highly dependent on the game, and additionally due to the large performance hit is something that developers specifically make optional. All the driver updates in the world in this case don't "cripple" GTX cards. The choice is 100% the users.

            Providing a completely optional feature which didn't exist prior is the exact opposite of crippling.

            • I'm sure that you'll be able to turn it off in the advanced settings, like most video card features. That said, how many people actually bother to change the default settings past the default Medium/High/Ultra options?

    • for my old GTX 240. It sucks. Some games wouldn't let you turn it off,

      You should have just not installed it, then. PhysX is optional.

  • 2080, why bother? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 )

    Yet another reason to take a pass on 2080. And 2060 doesn't even need another reason.

    Then there is this. [kitguru.net] Probably, Radeon VII is the ideal platform because memory bandwidth is everything.

    • Yet another reason is that even Microsoft rapidly goes away from Windows. nVidia's drivers for anything but Windows are of such low quality that Linus' word choice is way too mild.

      • Are we talking old Linus or new Linus?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      To enjoy new and advanced computer games on Windows 10.

    • Look if you gushed anymore about AMD you'd need a diaper. Your response to "another reason to pass" is you advocate a 2x performance hit on other cards?

      If the 2060 can raytrace without speed impact over the 1660 then it's quite a good reason to go for it in a high end system. Then you go on to say memory bandwidth is everything, which if you've looked at benchmarks can only mean that you're not actually interested in ever playing games as much as you just want GPUs to play with moving data around your RAM.

      E

  • > 18 fps at 1440p -- obviously an unplayable frame-rate.

    Mother f**kers aint seen me overclocking my celeron to 233MHZ with a box fan to cool it to get 25 FPS in Quake.

    • Then your machine sucked ass. Quake was damn slow on 486 but pretty snappy on Pentium; a single Pentium 2 was enough to send four 320x240 streams over X forwarding to IRIX boxen at a semi-playable frame rate.

  • I played through Metro Exodus with a 2080 ti on a shiny new machine on a 4K monitor.

    I remained unaware through the whole experience as to whether RTX was on and if it was, what difference it made.
    Side by side you might be able to tell, but you don't play games side by side.

    Maybe it looks a little better, but if it does, I don't care. The game was pretty good and fun to play, albeit with a stupid ending, which seems normal these days. Issues of frame rate, RTX, DLSS or anything else never really impinged on

    • I remained unaware through the whole experience as to whether RTX was on and if it was, what difference it made.

      Then you may not be paying attention. The difference is night and day. I don't use that in the traditional english way, I mean literally the difference is like standing in a room with a sun in it, or having the moon stream light through the window.

      There's no doubt Metro Exodus is a gorgeous game. Absolutely amazing. The amount of detail they put into lighting and shadows as it was is breathtaking. However if you're creeping in the shadows, moving within buildings, hiding behind things at night, the differen

      • >Then you may not be paying attention.

        Yes. That was my point. I was playing the game, not paying attention to the lighting. It looked good, especially compared the to Apple //e sitting next to it.

        • Just because you aren't focused on something doesn't mean it's irrelevant to normal humans. I'm happy you enjoyed the game. I enjoyed it too. I was also far more immersed in it when RTX made it look even more realistic.

          Hell we're on Slashdot here. The Venn diagram of Slashdot users and Normal Humans doesn't have a lot of overlap.

  • Surely nVidia's decision to enable their older cards to run ray tracing has nothing to do with Crysis demoing real time ray tracing on AMD GPUs [techspot.com] a couple days ago. As Cryengine has shown, real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators. This kinda makes the main selling point of the GeForce 20 series more or less moot.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators

        Let me rephrase that for you, {...} "transform and lighting can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators".

        Actually only this last part is comparable to the discussion.

        When T&L was introduced by Nvidia, it wasn't offering magnitudes more than what a beefy CPU with the latest SIMD extensions could offer.
        Transforming a larger collection of geometry was equally possible by adding separate specialised single puprose blocks to the GPU, or adding even larger faster SIMD with multithreading capabilities to the CPU.

        It's only later, when the shader got unified (it's not anymore extra specialized single purpose blocks

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Raytracing in software is nothing new. It's been done on ancient double digit mhz speed CPUs since the 80's. How quickly you can do it is a whole nother matter. Does it take hours to render a single 640x480 frame, or can you get real time 1080p60 rendering is a whole nother question

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cederic ( 9623 )

        Yeah, I was thinking that.

        I had real time ray tracing on my Atari ST. Frame rates weren't great but you did usually get over one a week.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sad_ ( 7868 )

        640x480? those cpu's you talk about would render it in much, much lower resolution.
        still it was sooooo cool to see.

        don't know what everybody is complaining about, this is the first version of this tech, in 5 years it will be just as fast as regular 3d is now.

        • The point is that right now, ray tracing on the RTX cards substantially hurts performance and is not playable on older GTX cards. This feature doesn’t make the NVidia cards that favorable.

    • Surely nVidia's decision to enable their older cards to run ray tracing has nothing to do with Crysis demoing real time ray tracing on AMD GPUs [techspot.com] a couple days ago.

      Unlikely. This was going to happen one way or the other anyway. Microsoft's DXR specifically has fallback modes when dedicated hardware isn't availble and this was announced back when RTX was first released as well. The timing here isn't even convenient since nothing a consumer can buy actually runs on the engine which has been demoed.

      real time ray tracing can be done in software without the need for specialized hardware accelerators. This kinda makes the main selling point of the GeForce 20 series more or less moot.

      Oh man I remember and early Slashdot post in the 90s talking about the fact that we don't need 3D Accelerators we just need to optimise our CPU rendering software. Along that

  • Sigh (Score:1)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    If there's one thing I've learned, and one thing that nVidia in particular has taught me, it's never to expect a product to have properly any feature that's only introduced post-launch on other models.

    They'll just half-arse it, cut the drivers in a year's time, and it'll never do what could have been done so that they can sell next year's card.

  • Sure, it allows for super-realistic reflections and shadows, but we can fake those, and spend the resources on other effects or simply a higher resolution and better frame rate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      I guess that will make GTX the second series of cards that ray-tracing doesn't really work on.

  • I am not dissing it; I am just trying to understand its relevance - not being a gamer, I guess that it won't be very relevant to me. Nevertheless, I would be interested to learn in what other areas this is likely to have an impact.

  • ... or three times as quick?

    1.6, 2 and 3 times as fast or 1.6, 2 and 3 times faster?

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