RTX on GTX cards

Any thoughts?

RTX on GTX: Nvidia is enabling ray tracing on some GeForce GTX graphics cards

Interesting though not particularly beneficial. Even a 1080 Ti will likely struggle to get anything playable with RTX on.

This is much more of a move by nVidia to help jumpstart RT development and also for marketing purposes.

THey can turn to developers and state the install base for RTX just increased massively, tell consumers they have this “great feature” and then get more people to potentially upgrade after seeing it first hand and potentially having poor performance.

Smacks as a bit of a desperate move because the 20 Series is not moving as well as nVidia hoped. Also a bit of a response to Crytek demoing RT on a Vega 56

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That’s like AMD saying they are enabling it on their cards it’s not something you “enable” it’s only a thing on rtx cards since asic for it on chip(I know you know this @DerKrieger). This is clearly exactly what you said “look at our massive install base”.

They obviously can´t let Crytek’s “raytracing on everything” slide without, ehm… upping by one?


Edit:

There is 0 risk, 100% marketing in “enableing” raytracing on GTX cards.
My guess is this is to get people to shell out in price segments they were not customers in previously.

Well it still is a GPGPU task. Any modern GPU architecture can run it. Just with a massive performance hit as it doesn’t have dedicated hardware/optimizations for it on die.

nVidia was not allowing it to be enabled regardless. If you didn’t have an RTX card you couldn’t enable it in game. (Which is a decision I support actually.)

Now you can. Though of course it will be a bad experience.

Fuck most people probably don’t enable it even people with RTX cards

I have yet to see any raytracing that I was like I need this seems cool for vr that’s about it to me with how good they have gotten at faking it

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And who can blame them?
I would not want a performance hit for marginally better* visuals I have to hunt for to notice.

*Better as in “grainy water” in BF V

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Probably not no lol but at least now if you were on the fence about it you can see the effects first hand and determine if you wouldn’t want an RTX card moving forward.

That is about the only consumer benefit.

Again if RTX was selling well I doubt we would have seen this move

RT and path tracing definitely are great methods of rendering a scene and I’m sure in future we will see much more of it and implemented well however the hardware isn’t there yet.

I do give credit to nVidia for making a risky move betting the farm on RT and Turing, trying to do something a little innovative at least but the 20 series is most certainly a beta

Does it just work?

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There is 0 risk basing your entire upcoming product generation on an as yet unproven technology while sinking massive resources into R&D, development, ect with no guarantee of pay off or adoption? wut

nVidia’s last earnings call wasn’t exactly rosy for the consumer graphics segment. Turing is selling like crap comparatively and the share price reflects it

Should specify that: RTX as a feature, with Nvidias history with closed source features that went nowhere, yes, huge risk.
RTX on GTX cards, 0 risk.

I thought it was fairly obvious I was referring to RTX and the Turing architecture generally not RT on GTX but fair enough. Sorry for not being clear with that. Editing.

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Ray tracing is just mathematical calculation.
The RTX cards have specific hardware module that does those calculations, but there is absolutely no reason even 7970 can’t have a crack at ray tracing.

@Richard_Bogan do you have anything to contribute to this topic?

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This could be useful to have a cheap non-RTX card be as a dedicated Raytracing card, just like you would with PhysX.

Wow I did not expect them to give up on the hardware that quick.

It will run worse for sure but now that it runs at all it will be expected on all future cards, I mean they graciously allow it on a 1060 after all.

And yet… still outselling amd 4 to 1

Really hoping navi is decent, dont want a repeat of history

E.g

The graphics equivalent of overpriced quad cores for 10 years

They haven’t…
They still have their dedicated RT cores and stuff.
How good you think 1660 will be in ray tracing when 2060 can barely push it?

Smells like admission of RTX failure in the market to me.

RTX has been mostly “meh” - so no one is buying RTX cards specifically for RTX, they’re buying much cheaper high end 10 series instead.

So, in order to get some even half-assed market penetration they need to push it to lower end cards.

2c. RTX is half baked. Buying into it this early is a waste of time. The hardware simply isn’t there yet.

I never got Raytracing from the get go. Don’t get me wrong, the potential is great. But i don’t feel anyone really wants that at the moment.

I mean, you get a 1000$ card, that then can’t deliver consistently over 60FPS on 1080p? Where is the value in that? I feel like most people dropping 600$+ on a GPU would go 144Hz first, then 1440p. After that’s done, maybe Raytracing is a thing. But i doubt that. I think RTX will be a thing once you can use it at 1440p 144Hz with maxed Details. Most people won’t give up any of those things for the minimal visuals Raytracing adds.

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