Pascal GeForce GTX card users, who are eagerly awaiting the new offerings from Nvidia regarding ray tracing, will get a first taste thanks to the driver update in April.
Nvidia has announced that its cards, in addition to improved performance and memory, will now be able to enable ray tracing. However, not all cards will have this feature. The models that will receive this update are the following: Titan XP, Titan X, GTX 1080 and 1070, the GTX 1060 6GB version, GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660, as well as the Titan V.
However, enabling ray tracing in a game or an application becomes feasible using DirectX Raytracing.
“GeForce RTX card users will have up to 2-3 times faster performance [compared to the GTX] thanks to the dedicated RT cores in their GPUs, allowing the use of higher quality settings», the company said.
“The RT cores in GeForce RTX GPUs provide specialized hardware that enables ray tracing acceleration.”
Unity and Unreal are partnering with Nvidia on ray tracing capabilities for the popular frameworks. During the GTC conference on Monday, Nvidia and Unity demonstrated real-time ray tracing on a BMW 8 series model.
This feature gives designers the ability to highlight dangerous reflections or blind spots in vehicle design.
“Until the arrival of Nvidia RTX, real-time ray tracing was just a thought. Now, millions of developers working in Unity can achieve stunning graphics at lightning speed”, said Bob Pette, vice president of Nvidia.
