Soon you’ll be able to turn ray-tracing on with your non-RTX graphics card.
At GDC last year, we saw multiple tech companies begin discussing the potential for bringing real-time ray-tracing to videogames. Nvidia was the first to really begin pushing that boat with the launch of RTX graphics cards, featuring specific hardware to make ray-tracing faster and more efficient. From next month on though, you won’t need an RTX-specific GPU in order to make use of ray-tracing.
Ray-tracing has always been possible on non-RTX graphics cards. The RT Cores found within Turing just make ray-tracing operations faster. Microsoft’s DXR API is the layer that actually makes it all function. Until now, Nvidia’s driver has locked out non-RTX GPUs from running DXR but that will be changing in April, with Nvidia opening DXR compatibility to the GTX 10-series and the new GTX 16-series of graphics cards.
