Gaming is fun! We all know that, it’s why we love it so much. For PC gamers, sometimes where you play your games can be turned into a game itself. The never-ending hunt to keep your frames high and your temperatures low. Recently Nvidia launched their Turing RTX line-up of desktop graphics cards. RTX was announced last August at Gamescom 2018 and started shipping in September of that year. The RTX cards were meant to replace the Pascal GTX cards which launched back in 2015.
As with any launch of a new product, there were a few hurdles. One of the challenges the new RTX cards faced at launch was pricing. The highest end consumer card for the RTX line, the 2080ti, launched at a suggested MSRP of $999. This was $300 more than the highest end consumer card for the GTX line, the 1080ti. Continuing down the line of announced RTX cards the 2080, 2070 and 2060, they were all markedly more expensive than the counterparts they were replacing. This was met with some criticism from the PC Gaming community. While some people are totally fine with the suggested MSRP on some of the cards, others thought the performance to price ratio worked against the cards favor. Even more so when the cards were compared directly against the cards of the previous generation. The GTX line-up just showed to get you more bang for your buck, and the community voted with their wallet. Nvidia reported a 45% drop in gaming revenue, citing lower than expected sales of their RTX cards. With RTX being the flagship product, and Nvidia ending production of GTX cards, it’s apparent that RTX cards are the cards of the future whether the masses like it or not.
Which is why it’s surprising that during GDC 2019, Nvidia announced that ray tracing was coming to older GTX cards (GTX 1060 6gb and higher) via a driver update in April. One of the main features of the RTX cards is the presence of the RT cores, which allows for dynamic lighting, shadows, and reflections on levels previously not possible. This feature is known as real-time ray tracing.
On RTX cards, the RT cores do all the work. Enabling ray tracing features does have an impact on game performance, but there is dedicated hardware for ray tracing. However, on GTX cards there are no RT cores. This means ray tracing will need to be done on the shader cores, a component that is already used in many of the graphics functions of the card. GTX cards are about to be put to work.
Nvidia has a reason for making our cards work over-time. The goal in magically backporting this feature is to capitalize on the current install base of the GTX cards. As of writing, per the most recent Steam hardware survey, RTX cards make up 1.11% of the cards being used to access Steam, while GTX cards make up for 41.18%. This is a huge difference. Adding ray tracing to a game hopefully looks more appealing to developers since instead of adding a niche feature, now a sizeable portion of the gaming community will be able to access ray tracing. Coupled with updates to popular game engines such as Unreal Engine 4 and Unity to better support ray tracing, hopefully, this means we’ll see an increase in the adoption of this next-gen feature.
The patch goes live in April, we’ll have to wait and see what type of real-world performance we can expect. I’m cautiously optimistic to see how this performs on my GPU (I’m using a 1070ti), but I’m going in expecting this to be a feature that gets activated depending on the type of game that I’m playing. If this has the outcome that Nvidia wants and more devs add real-time ray tracing, story-driven narrative games that focus on expansive and beautiful worlds will get an opportunity to augment environmental story-telling in new and exciting ways. While my next GPU upgrade is still a ways away, I’m glad I get to dip my toes into the latest tech features that are available. I’ll update this article once the driver is out and I give it a spin.
Save Point: Luna 