Titan V VS 3DMARK Port Royal – RT Cores Matter!

It should be well known now that Nvidia’s Titan V supports DXR (DirectX Raytracing), after all, it was the first graphics card to be shown making use of the API, with Nvidia using it to showcase their now famous Star Wars ray tracing demo. 

Later in that same year, Nvidia launched their RTX series of graphics cards, an evolution over Turing with enhanced SMs, Tensor cores and a new hardware feature called RT cores, which Nvidia claimed would increase the ray tracing performance of their graphics cards significantly.  

Today, we will see exactly what Nvidia’s RT cores do, and how much of an impact they have over Nvidia’s first ray tracing graphics hardware, all thanks to UL benchmark’s new 3DMARK Port Royal utility. This tool focuses on ray tracing performance, which will allow us to see how much performance each graphics card truly offers in heavy DXR workloads. 

The results below come from a member of the OC3D Forums called Kaapstad, who has access to both a Titan V and a Titan RTX, graphics cards which he has overclocked and tested under 3DMARK Port Royal to see the impact of Nvidia’s RT cores on Ray Tracing performance. An important factor to note is that the Nvidia Titan V is currently more expensive than the Titan RTX. 

What we see below is that the Kaapstad’s overclocked Titan RTX offers a 2.56X performance boost over an overclocked Titan V, with the overclocked Titan V offering similar levels of ray tracing performance to an RTX 2060, a graphics card that will cost £330 when it launches next week. Think about that, in terms of ray tracing performance the Titan V offers similar performance to a graphics card that is almost 10x less expensive.