DXR Ray Tracing Support is coming to Pascal and GTX Turing

Would Ray Tracing see wider adoption if DXR-compliant hardware was more readily available? Want to see how fast Pascal is at Ray Tracing? Do you just want to avoid Nvidia’s RT cores? Good news, Nvidia has confirmed that they are bringing DXR support to Pascal and GTX Turing series graphics cards. 

How? Doesn’t Ray Tracing need RT cores? No, DXR Ray Tracing has a direct compute mode, with Nvidia’s RT cores only serving to accelerate the workload. DXR could work on and DirectX 12 compliant graphics card, but until now Nvidia has kept DXR support behind their RTX lineup.   

Since the release of their RTX series Nvidia has realised something, something simple. DXR could see wider adoption if more graphics cards supported the technology, and the only way to truly understand the benefits of the company’s RT cores is to see how games with Ray Tracing perform without them. It’s a simple move, but a masterstroke for the company. 

Now, tens of millions of DXR capable graphics cards are in the wild, with support coming via a driver update sometime in April. This will allow more game developers to experiment with DXR and potentially allow DXR to be utilised across a broader range of gaming titles. At this time it is unknown if AMD plans to follow suit and enable DXR support with a future Radeon Software Adrenalin release.