NVIDIA Saying Pascal and Volta graphics cards will support DXR Soon

The new driver with DXR support will be available in April.

Pascal gets ray tracing: The company’s marquee gaming-related announcement today is that, as many have been expecting would happen, NVIDIA is bringing DirectX 12 DXR raytracing support to the company’s GeForce 10 series and GeForce 16 series cards.  Nvidia promised to provide a driver with DXR support for Pascal and Volta graphics cards. The update will rely on Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing API. NVIDIA engineers have been working on ray tracing optimization for GeForce RTX series. As a result, it was possible to enable DXR for older GPUs, such as GTX 1080 Ti or GTX 1060 6GB. The performance of GeForce RTX series compared to GeForce GTX series is 2-3 x faster, according to NVIDIA’s own words.

Under the hood, NVIDIA is implementing support for DXR via compute shaders run on the CUDA cores. In this area the recent GeForce GTX 16 series cards, which are based on the Turing architecture sans RTX hardware, have a small leg up. Turing includes separate INT32 cores (rather than tying them to the FP32 cores), so like other compute shader workloads on these cards, it’s possible to pick up some performance by simultaneously executing FP32 and INT32 instructions. It won’t make up for the lack of RTX hardware, but it at least gives the recent cards an extra push. Otherwise, Pascal cards will be the slowest in this respect, as their compute shader-based path has the highest overhead of all of these solutions.

The new driver with DXR support will be available in April.

Mohsen Daemi
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