[SOLVED] Can you turn on Ray Tracing on GTX 1050ti ?

[Gordon3002]

I know that the GTX 1060 can technically turn on ray tracing. Nvidia never mentioned the GTX 1050ti or 1050 but is it possible to do it anyway ?

 

[Math Geek]

no. ray tracing is not something that can be "turned on" it is a part of the hardware itself that is missing from the much older 1050ti card. ray tracing did not exist then and is not part of the card

 

[InvalidError]

The 10/16-series do not have RT hardware, so the only ray-tracing you may be able to do on those non-RTX cards would be RT emulation at something like 5fps.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The GTX 1050 Ti cannot run DirectX or Vulkan based ray tracing. It may be able to run other applications that perform ray tracing, but they won't be games and they won't likely have real-time interactivity.

Spoiler: And just me being pedenatic

The term "ray tracing" is ambiguous unfortunately. Taken without much context, the only thing you can get out of it is it's referring to the family of algorithms that have the same basic description: shoot rays from the camera and see how they interact with the world. What most in the industry mean when they say "ray tracing" is path tracing.

Another thing is that ray tracing algorithms have been used in games for a long time. Wolfenstein 3D for instance uses ray casting to render the world. In more modern games, toned down ray tracing is used to create reflection effects. The reflection method screen space reflections is actually a ray tracing method. But since the only thing being determined is what pixel on the screen (hence its name, "screen space") a reflective surface should render, it's much cheaper than path tracing.

What Turing and RNDA2 brought to the table was hardware to accelerate ray tracing. You do not need this hardware to actually run it and Microsoft provides a software based backup method. Though tapping in to this requires driver support and hence why only certain GeForce 10 and 16 cards can use DXR. And for whatever reason AMD decided to not support it at all.

 

[hamletrules]

I know that the GTX 1060 can technically turn on ray tracing. Nvidia never mentioned the GTX 1050ti or 1050 but is it possible to do it anyway ?

I suppose that is why rtx is in the name of the 20series and above cards lmao.

 

[Gordon3002]

The 10/16-series do not have RT hardware, so the only ray-tracing you may be able to do on those non-RTX cards would be RT emulation at something like 5fps.

Yeah I know, I just wanted to know if I’d be able to try it out on the 1050ti (obviously not playing with ray tracing)

 

[punkncat]

At one point a while back I recall Nvidia releasing a Beta driver that allowed Ray Tracing to be turned on with cards that didn't support it. IIRC it went back to 1080 and up. I am also fairly sure that the project got scrapped pretty quickly because it was severely hamstringing performance on cards without the additional (whatever they call them) cores.

Seems, according to this link from 2019 that it went back to 1060 cards.

How to enable DXR Ray Tracing on GTX 10 series pascal GPUs - Gizbot News

I have Tomb Raider which supports this feature, but the option to turn it on is not available. Neither is it on CP77.

 

[InvalidError]

Yeah I know, I just wanted to know if I’d be able to try it out on the 1050ti (obviously not playing with ray tracing)

In principle, DXR can run RT on any hardware using whatever level of emulation is necessary to make it work. In practice, most games don't allow you to do it as running RT on non-RT hardware or software renderer produces unusable frame rates.

 

[hotaru.hino]

At one point a while back I recall Nvidia releasing a Beta driver that allowed Ray Tracing to be turned on with cards that didn't support it. IIRC it went back to 1080 and up. I am also fairly sure that the project got scrapped pretty quickly because it was severely hamstringing performance on cards without the additional (whatever they call them) cores.

Seems, according to this link from 2019 that it went back to 1060 cards.

How to enable DXR Ray Tracing on GTX 10 series pascal GPUs - Gizbot News

I have Tomb Raider which supports this feature, but the option to turn it on is not available. Neither is it on CP77.

The gotcha is only the 6GB version is supported. The 3GB version is not. Ray tracing requires a significant amount of VRAM to hold the acceleration data. And it's still enabled, given that 3D Mark has recent entries for Port Royal using recent drivers.

If you have a 6GB version, then the application is probably disabling it because they don't think you should enable it.