Just a few days ago NVIDIA released their driver that extends DXR (Ray Tracing) support beyond the RTX 20 series allowing GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and up to be able to support real time ray tracing via DXR.
The performance metrics that NVIDIA shared in their marketing material focused on 1440p gaming with a variety of graphics cards but I was curious about the performance when things were turned down to a more reasonable 1080p resolution with the settings tuned more conservatively, so that is where we are today.
This is just a snapshot of 1080p performance from a few graphics cards across several title just to see where things stand and if they can deliver a playable experience at those tuned down settings.
ComponentsZ370CPUIntel Core i9-9900k @ 5GHzMemory 16GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200MotherboardEVGA Z370 Classified KStorageCrucial P1 1TB NVMe SSDPSUCooler Master V1200 Platinum GPUArchitectureCore CountClock SpeedMemory CapacityMemory SpeedNVIDIA RTX 2060 FETuring19041365/1686GB GDDR614GbpsZOTAC Gaming GTX 1660Turing14081530/17856GB GDDR58GbpsNVIDIA GTX 1080 FEPascal25601607/17338GB GDDR5X10Gbps It works.
The performance penalty for trying to run ray traced effects in games, outside of Shadow of the Tomb Raider with a single light point, is pretty substantial and gives us at least a hint of the usefulness of the RT cores found within the RTX 2060.
We could go on all day arguing semantics but the reality of the RT cores usefulness is more than evident when looking at the performance of Metro Exodus, Justice, and Atomic heart where when multiple forms of the hybrid ray tracing are being used.