Nvidia Ray Tracing is coming to older GTX graphics cards. While the technology was a major highlight of the Nvidia RTX series graphics cards, it seems that older GPUs can run ray tracing features as well. Do not get your hopes up as only a few features will be coming to older graphics cards and advanced features will remain exclusive to the RTX family.
When Nvidia announced Ray Tracing AMD was skeptical about the new technology and mentioned that it would only launch such features when they could be offered across their different products and while that seemed to be an excuse at the time, it makes a lot of sense now.
While Nvidia Ray Tracing technology is indeed coming to Pascal graphics cards, it is worth mentioning that the GTX 1080 Ti, one of the most powerful graphics cards on the market is only capable of low-level Ray Tracing features so you should not expect much from the GTX 1060 or the GTX 1660 either. Nvidia has revealed some Ray Tracing benchmarks and you can check them out below:
While this technology is new and we do not know were it is headed, it is worth pointing out that even though it has been months since the RTX cards have been released we have seen very limited support for Nvidia Ray Tracing and DLSS technology. This could change in the future but keeping in mind that this is the major selling point of the RTX cards, we cannot recommend the RTX cards for Ray Tracing alone.
While these cards are very powerful indeed, turning RTX on has a massive hit on performance and in some cases, even the top of the line RTX 2080 Ti is unable to run games at 1080p 60 FPS with Nvidia Ray Tracing effects on. This is something that you need to keep in mind. Nvidia has also released the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti which are great value for money and we have also looked into how you can overclock the 1660 in order to get 1660 Ti performance.
Let us know what you think about Nvidia introducing Ray Tracing to GTX cards and whether or not this is something that you are interested in.
