Ray tracing tech isn’t just for Nvidia’s RTX series of GPUs anymore says the American company; the folks at Nvidia have announced that they will be enabling ray tracing support for their older GTX 10-series cards as well as the brand new GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti cards.
For the GTX 10 series GPUs, only the GTX 1060 and higher will get the feature. According to PC World, developers and users don’t need to do anything besides updating their drivers to the upcoming April patch to get receive ray tracing support.
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It needs to be said however, unlike Nvidia’s RTX cards – which utilize integer and tensor cores – the GTX 10 series, which only have Cuda cores, may find it hard to run games with ray tracing enabled. According to Engadget, games like Battlefield V, which only uses ray tracing to detail reflections, should run fine; but the new Metro Exodus, which implements ray tracing in global illumination, will run too slow to be playable.
The GTX 1660 cards should fare better since it’s Turing architecture supports tensor cores, but don’t expect RTX-level performance.
Image credit: The Verge
Unity and Unreal are two popular engines that will be supporting ray tracing, so that’s a sign that the tech will be an important part of gaming in the future. So, it’s a welcome news that Nvidia are bringing ray tracing to other cards besides the RTX ones; however, it’ll take time before manufacturers learn how to make ray tracing more accessible and affordable for the masses.