Nvidia announced a driver update for GTX card to enable DirectX Raytracing. You can the full story here. If you’re happy with basic effects, the news isn’t too bad. The RTX 2080 Ti will outperform its 1080 Ti counterpart by just over double for reflections, in line with what you’d expect for a next-gen card. However, for stuff that really adds realism, like advanced shadows, global illumination, and ambient occlusion, the RTX 2080 Ti outperforms the 1080 Ti by up to a factor of six.
In case of the 20-series GPUs, ray tracing is hardware based (read RTCores) while DLSS provides the necessary performance boost if you fail to hit playable FPS. On the other hand, the GTX Pascal and Turing products, fall back to DXR’s software layer to perform real-time ray tracing.
Here are some of the benchmarks released by the Nvidia themselves:
So what good will the feature do you then? Well, you can always try out your favorite game and turn ray-tracing on and off to see whether you think it’s worth using. That’s certainly better than not having the effect at all.