Nvidia RTX graphics cards to lose their ray-tracing exclusivity

Real-time ray tracing was one of the main features added to Nvidia’s RTX lineup of graphics cards. Nvidia invested heavily in real-time ray tracing support, so heavily that the company replaced their age-old ‘GTX’ branding for the new ‘RTX’ label.

But the exclusivity of real-time ray tracing hasn’t lasted long with Nvidia claiming that GTX 10 series cards from the GTX 1060 and up will also receive the feature. The company also announced support for ray tracing on their new GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti GPUs, which comes as a bit of a shocker. Because if memory serves right, Nvidia claimed that RTX Series of gaming GPUs were the only game in town for ray tracing.

Nvidia’s original message when RTX GPUs first released was essentially “here’s a new feature available exclusively on our new RTX series”. And the gaming world might have been inclined to go with Nvidia’s message of ray tracing exclusivity if not for Crytek's stunning ray tracing demo running on AMD’s Radeon Vega 56 GPU: Quite the coincidence. Nvidia’s new message seems to be, “GTX owners can also have some ray tracing”.

But this is not to say that GTX cards can deliver the same ray tracing performance as their RTX counterparts. In fact, performance numbers are drastically affected by using ray tracing on GTX cards. Battlefield V should run adequately at low settings, but the recently released Metro Exodus will run at a meagre 18 fps at 1440p, an unplayable framerate.

To conclude, the games you’ll be able to play with ray-tracing on Nvidia GTX cards depends entirely on the implementation by the game’s developer.

What games you'll be able to play with ray-tracing tech (also known as DXR) on NVIDIA GTX cards depends entirely on how it's implemented. Be that as it may, Nvidia should have been more forthcoming about ray-tracing support. However, Nvidia has taken a step in the right direction by offering real-time ray tracing support on older cards.