Nvidia to bring DirectX ray tracing to the GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB and other Pascal cards in April

It seems ray tracing will be coming to Pascal after all. The much-heralded technology was previously restricted to some Turing-based graphics cards such as the RTX 20-series. But it won’t be long before owners of GeForce GTX 1070 cards or the brand-new GTX 1660 cards will be able to experience at least basic ray-tracing effects for themselves. A DXR-enabling Game Ready Driver is scheduled for download in April.

Nvidia has listed which cards will benefit from DXR: GTX 1060 6 GB, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, Titan X, Titan XP, GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Ti, and Titan V. This list encompasses cards based on Pascal microarchitecture, Turing microarchitecture (GeForce GTX 1660 & GTX 1660 Ti), and Volta (Titan V). The update applies to desktop cards and the equivalent laptop GPUs.

Obviously, graphics cards with the physical RT cores (GeForce RTX series) will perform their ray-tracing duties at a much higher level than those operating on optimized DXR software only, offering up to two to three times faster performance. But Nvidia hopes that enabling millions of older Pascal-based cards will encourage developers to further embrace ray-tracing technology.