NVIDIA has just released its latest GeForce Game Ready driver update, and it brings their ray-tracing capabilities to the older 10-series GTX cards. Up until this latest update, ray-tracing has been reserved for its pricier GeForce 20-series RTX graphics cards, due to the GPUs’ underlying Turing architecture boasting dedicated RT cores for handling the complex calculations ray-tracing needs. “With this new driver however, GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and higher GPUs can execute ray-tracing instructions on traditional shader cores, giving gamers a taste, albeit at lower RT quality settings and resolutions, of how ray tracing will dramatically change the way games are experienced,” said the company. Read more for benchmark comparison videos and additional information.
Unfortunately, not all of the older GTX cards will be supported, just mainly the Pascal line that includes the GTX 1660 / 1660 Ti, up to the Titan XP. These GTX cards offer “low-ray count” in games that support ray tracing, so this definitely shouldn’t be your go to for graphics heavy games. “With dedicated RT cores, GeForce RTX GPUs provide up to 2-3x faster performance in ray-traced games, enabling more effects, higher ray counts, and higher resolutions for the best experience,” according to NVIDIA.
