The biggest selling point of graphics cards like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 has been their support for a powerful new feature known as real-time ray tracing. But with a driver update that’s scheduled to be released in April, Nvidia will bring DirectX ray tracing (DXR) technology to recent GTX graphics cards, the company announced at GDC 2019 on Monday.
Nvidia has spent the past year trying to make the case for its newest graphics cards, the expensive GeForce RTX line of GPUs. The biggest selling point of Nvidia’s RTX cards has been support for a powerful new feature known as real-time ray tracing, long considered the “holy grail” of graphics rendering technology. When Nvidia announced the feature — which it calls Nvidia RTX — a year ago at the Game Developers Conference, the company said that the technology would run only on its RTX GPUs, which wouldn’t be available until September.
Next month, that will no longer be the case.
Graphics cards like the RTX 2080 use that naming convention because they were designed for RTX. But with a driver update that’s scheduled to be released in April, Nvidia will bring its RTX technology to 10 different GTX graphics cards that are already on the market — some of which are nearly three years old. The list runs the gamut from the 6 GB GTX 1060 up to the GTX 1080 Ti. It also includes Nvidia’s newest GPUs: the GTX 1660 and GTX 1660 Ti, two cheaper cards that the company released this winter. And this applies to the laptop and Max-Q equivalents of these GPUs, too.
The new driver will allow the GTX cards in question to play games with real-time ray tracing features. Game developers won’t have to do anything to add support for the GTX cards (although, of course, this will only apply to games that already offer RTX functionality).
Adding RTX support to GTX cards is undeniably a positive step for Nvidia and the advancement of graphics technology. Real-time ray tracing is a very promising development, and it represents the future of gaming graphics. But as is often the case in software development, there’s a chicken-or-the-egg problem here.
Few games currently support real-time ray tracing, since the technology is so new; Nvidia’s RTX lineup launched just six months ago. Without a larger library of games that offer DirectX ray tracing (DXR) enhancements, there’s little reason for customers to upgrade to an RTX GPU — especially since they’re more expensive than similarly capable non-RTX cards from both Nvidia and AMD.
