New Nvidia Drivers Unlock Ray Tracing on GTX Cards
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, 04-14-2019 at 10:54 AM (783 Views)
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When Nvidia launched Turing, it decided to bifurcate its product branding, splitting the GeForce brand into two segments. GTX cards, even those based on Turing-class GPUs, would not include the new specialized hardware functions that enable Nvidia’s ray tracing support. RTX cards, which support Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) with some additional hardware capabilities, would.
Last month, the company shifted this guidance. DXR/RTX capabilities would be unlocked on Nvidia GTX GPUs, including last-generation Pascal cards, via a special driver update. But Nvidia’s early discussions of DXR also emphasized that the performance impact of enabling ray tracing was ruinous — heavy enough that only specialty cards like Turing could handle it in the first place. The new WHQL 425.31 driver enables RTX on GTX GPUs.
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