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NVIDIA will enable real-time ray tracing for its GTX 10XX graphics cards via DXR in April


NVIDIA has announced that it will be bringing real-time ray tracing to its Pascal GPUs. According to the green team, a new driver will enable all GTX10XX series graphics cards, from GTX1060 all the way up to the GTX1080Ti, to run real-time ray tracing via the DXR API.

As NVIDIA noted,  GeForce GTX gamers will have an opportunity to use ray tracing at lower RT quality settings and resolutions, while GeForce RTX users will experience up to 2-3x faster performance. Naturally, this performance jump is thanks to the dedicated RT Cores that the Turing GPUs feature.

Realistically speaking, we don’t expect a lot of GTX gamers to be able to enjoy the real-time ray tracing effects at an acceptable framerate/visual ratio. Still, this is great news as it will allow more developers to start implementing real-time ray tracing effects in their games.

NVIDIA recommends Pascal owners to use basic real-time ray tracing effects with low ray count. The driver that will enable RT on the Pascal GPUs will come out in April and the the supported GeForce GTX graphics cards will work without any newer game updates.