Nvidia recently released a new driver update version 425.31 that enables Pascal GPUs (1060 and above) to use Real-time Ray Tracing just like their RTX counterparts…but is it worth using though?

In the latest findings made by Digial Foundry, they tested this experience running on the 1060, 1080 and 1080ti and found out that framerates will vary wildly depending on the game. Generally speaking, in any kind of scene where there is a moderate amount of Ray-traced effects occurring, framerate tanks to around the 30-40 fps range even on the 1080ti at 1080p.

You can watch their coverage here:

It appears that Nvidia hasn’t really hasn’t thought this one through. Its not a good showcase of the technology if on one hand having it enabled on non-RTX cards basically makes titles dip into console framerate territory from a smooth experience. The increase in graphical (in this case lighting) fidelity simply isn’t worth the drop in framerates for Pascal cards at least.

Of course, cynical people like me would be quick to point out that it seems to be a ploy to get people to upgrade to RTX from their previous generation cards; I doubt anyone would though. With the Cry Engine DXR demo showing us that real time ray-tracing can also be done on a platform agnostic graphics API such as DirectX, it shouldn’t be long for gamers to wait for an implementation like this to show up on games in the very near future to deliver similar visuals but with a much lower performance penalty.

Chia is the horse-author from the far flung year of 2153. While not grazing on grass pastures or reviewing old time-y games and technology from the early 21st century pretending to not know what comes next (as to not disturb the space-time continuum), he can be seen exchanging vast quantities of Earth currency for parts needed to fix his damaged space ship.