Nvidia GTX graphics cards will be launched in April

Until now, Nvidia considered ray tracing as an exclusive feature only available for its Turing RTX graphics cards, but the company now allows it suddenly on graphics cards as low as a GeForce GTX 1060.

On the first day of GDC 2019, Nvidia announced the launch of a driver allowing Pascal and Turing GTX graphics cards to render ray tracing effects using DirectX Raytracing (DXR). The list of supported graphics cards includes both the recently introduced GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660, as well as everything between a GTX 1060 (6GB) and Titan X.

These Turing and Pascal GTX cards will be able to handle games running with basic RT effects and a low number of spokes – or, in other words, RTX Low settings – although your mileage may vary depending on the title that You play.

How it works?

During our briefing, we were told that Battlefield V should work well on most cards and on the RTX Medium to High settings because the game only rendered ray tracing reflections. Meanwhile, some heavy shadow scenes in Shadow of the Tomb Raider (which still has not received its RTX and DLSS patches) could get stuck on your GPU.

Metro Exodus is the toughest group in the group because it uses ray tracing technology to power its global lighting engine. Nvidia pointed out that users would see the best experience possible with an RTX graphics card.

According to Nvidia, ray tracing on GTX cards was still on his roadmap. However, this statement seems to go against all the marketing of the company and the numbers that previously indicated that ray tracing could never be achieved on a traditional GPU without the dedicated RT cores.

Nvidia, on the contrary, seems to be trying to anticipate the possibility that the next generation consoles, the PS5 and the Xbox Two, will be equipped with ray tracing functions. Nvidia would be in a delicate situation if these future consoles could play games with DXR and its high-end cards, even if those of the previous generation, could not.

In a smaller related note, Nvidia also announced the introduction of DXR in Unreal Engine and Unity. As ray tracing technology is integrated into the two main game engines, which power 90% of the games in the world, we hope (or hope) to see more ray tracing games in the near future.