NVIDIA Driver 425.31 released, bringing DXR support to some Pascal and non RT Turing GPUs

[Mira Yurizaki]

https://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/145872

 

The only important bit for this release is:

Quote

Gaming Technology
Includes support for DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (and higher) and GeForce GTX 1660 (and higher) GPUs

 

However that wasn't all. NVIDIA also released three tech demos to show off DXR (Found at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/20-series/rtx/?cjevent=4b01a2dc5c6011e982dd004e0a1c0e12 if you scroll towards the bottom), so you don't have to buy any games. They also included the Star Wars based Reflections demo, so now you can run that.

 

Now I get to see how (horribly) these run on my GTX 1080

 

As a reminder, you need Windows 10 build 1809 or later to have DXR support enabled on top of the new drivers.

 

EDIT: Because it's probably important to know. The resolution the tech demos run at appears to be tied to your desktop resolution. So if you want to run them at a different resolution, you have to change your desktop's resolution. Currently only 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p are supported, as far as I know.

[.Apex.]

5 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Now I get to see how (horribly) these run on my GTX 1080

Update us on that if you can

[Princess Luna]

Goodie, time to DDU in safe mode and reinstall nvidia's driver fresh new... my gaming ring with the 1080 Ti is still running driver 399 hehe

[Mira Yurizaki]

12 minutes ago, _Syn_ said:

Update us on that if you can

Up to about 10FPS at 1440p. It's roughly double the performance at 1080p.

[RejZoR]

Cool. Might try it for lolz on my GTX 1080Ti. Any info if Futuremark's Ray Tracing bench uses DXR for ray tracing? I think it does. I don't see much practical use for DXR as whole this moment, but it'll be interesting to play with.

 

EDIT:

Nice, there is more tech demos. Gonna torture my system tonight

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Cool. Might try it for lolz on my GTX 1080Ti. Any info if Futuremark's Ray Tracing bench uses DXR for ray tracing? I think it does.

It would have to, since DXR is currently the only "standard" way to do it.

[.Apex.]

4 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Up to about 10FPS at 1440p. It's roughly double the performance at 1080p.

Oof but it's not so bad if it gets around 20 FPS at 1080p though, might be around 30 FPS in games at 1080p, i would consider that playable

[Origami Cactus]

I was going to try it on my 1080ti, i installed the new driver, downloaded the demos, but:

 

I maybe am going to update my os, but i don't want to. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I tried the Justice demo. It runs a lot smoother at 1080p than Reflections did. At best all I have to show is this graph from Precision X:

Those spikes of high performance were from simpler scenes.

[.Apex.]

5 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I tried the Justice demo. It runs a lot smoother at 1080p than Reflections did. At best all I have to show is this graph from Precision X: 

Thank you, that's actually very informative!

[maartendc]

What kind of pointless addition is this?

With a GTX 1070 you get less than 20 fps with DXR ... So: unplayable.

The graphs shown by Nvidia seem to be intended to say: "Look how good our 20-series cards are compared to the GARBAGE previous generation, you should really upgrade!! (for an almost invisible, useless function that you likely turn off anyway in a multiplayer game like BFV)."

Everyone knows that a GTX 1080 is still faster than a RTX 2060, and similar performance than the RTX 2070 for 99% of games, namely games without DXR and DLSS (if you want to turn it on in the first place).

And everyone now also knows that DLSS delivers worse performance than just resolution downscaling, and worse image quality on top of that as well.

What nonsense.

[RejZoR]

I mean, current situation is not any different compared to when Pixel Shaders were released. Pixel Shading just couldn't by done any other way than with graphic card that supported it. You could use CPU to render it, but it was horribly slow and graphic cards didn't have any general compute capability to do it on GPU. Ray tracing is no different. GTX cards weren't "shit", they just weren't designed to compute ray tracing. They can do it through general compute means, but since it's not optimized for such calculations specifically, it's slower. The fact it's running at 20+ fps is quite remarkable. Emulating pixel shaders on CPU meant 1-2fps lol...

[Mira Yurizaki]

To also add to what @RejZoR said, 3dfx infamously said that the lack of a Hardware Transform and Lighting engine, the fundamental building block of GPUs today, could be made up for by a reasonably fast CPU. They were correct, at least until Voodoo 4 & 5 came out and developers saw the appeal of Hardware T&L. Then it no longer mattered.

 

I mean, I guess this bolsters the point of why bother making DXR available for cards that don't have hardware RT, but we're in a transition period. You can't expect things to be up to whatever arbitrary demands you want at the start.

[porina]

Looking forward to comparing 1080Ti to 2070 when I get home!

 

Also good to hear the demos have been released. Was kinda hoping they do that sooner but maybe they needed more polish to run on end user systems and scale better.

[RejZoR]

8 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

To also add to what @RejZoR said, 3dfx infamously said that the lack of a Hardware Transform and Lighting engine, the fundamental building block of GPUs today, could be made up for by a reasonably fast CPU. They were correct, at least until Voodoo 4 & 5 came out and developers saw the appeal of Hardware T&L. Then it no longer mattered.

 

I mean, I guess this bolsters the point of why bother making DXR available for cards that don't have hardware RT, but we're in a transition period. You can't expect things to be up to whatever arbitrary demands you want at the start.

Well, if you get steady 30fps in some games using full DXR on GTX 1080Ti, that's already playable and incentive for developers to support ray tracing more. I'm still daydreaming of Killing Floor 2 supporting ray tracing. It already looks impressive with system it has, but having full blown ray tracing would be so awesome, seeing things in glass and pools of blood, uf.

[mxk]

I just want to ray trace minecraft

[Brooksie359]

Wait was the starwars demo just released? Gotta see how the 2080ti fairs. 

[RejZoR]

3 minutes ago, fantasia. said:

I just want to ray trace minecraft

This might be a reason to install Minekampf again.

[dtaflorida]

Interesting decision to support older cards. It's like they want you to see how slow the old cards are so you have a reason to upgrade. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

PS: daaaaamit i'm on windows 10 1803 ,_, not sure how stable is 1809

I've ran 1809 since November and had zero issues with it.

[.Apex.]

10 minutes ago, dtaflorida said:

Interesting decision to support older cards. It's like they want you to see how slow the old cards are so you have a reason to upgrade. 

Depends on how you look at it really, for people who want to tinker with these kinds of things it's a dream, sooo win-win?

[Mira Yurizaki]

12 minutes ago, dtaflorida said:

Interesting decision to support older cards. It's like they want you to see how slow the old cards are so you have a reason to upgrade. 

The fact that I can even play around with the software is more exciting than the prospect of playing it at better performance.

 

1 minute ago, VegetableStu said:

mmmmmk imma force an update

Remember to have an escape route, just in case

[Bcat00]

Give this a few more generations then it will be fine

[RejZoR]

Curious to see how Radeon VII would perform with DXR compared to GTX 1080Ti given they are otherwise roughly the same performance in rasterized graphics, but compute wise, Radeon VII is much more of a brute compared to 1080Ti.

[Ithanul]

 

47 minutes ago, fantasia. said:

I just want to ray trace minecraft

You don't need the driver for that.

A modder made a shader pack (its in alpha stage atm) that manages it without requiring specific hardware to work.   Look up SEUS PTGI.