[SOLVED] Does Nvidia GTX 970 Support PTGI/Ray tracing?

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How about Radeon RX 570? Because AMD announced that one of their upcomming drivers will support Ray tracing/PTGI on CryEngine.

AMD has already claimed that all of its current DX12 graphics cards support ray tracing via Microsoft’s DXR fallback layer. On the driver level, the support will be there.

BUT, this Fallback layer is just an emulation layer provided by MS, which is capable of running on any "D3D12" compatible GPU. It was originally meant so that the developers can learn the API (with having obvious DXR compatibility), and it was hardly intended to be able to run any games as such.

Once Ray Tacing Turing HW came out in the market, it's development was kind of halted, as it was deemed unnecessary. That it is...
Not at a hardware level. The GTX 970 is based on the Maxwell architecture, which does not feature RT or tensor cores on the die itself, so ray tracing isn't supported. You can enable ray tracing, but performance will be unplayable.

You will need to upgrade to an RTX 2060 at minimum for real-time ray tracing and dlss.
 
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What is the "Hardware level"

The GTX 970 does not have dedicated RT and TENSOR cores like the TURING GPUs, which are required to accelerate ray tracing and DLSS. The card will support ray tracing, but the performance is going to be sub-par. The GTX 970 is based on older GPU architecture/maxwell, and it lacks Ray tracing cores.
 
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The GTX 970 does not have dedicated RT and TENSOR cores like the TURING GPUs, which are required to accelerate ray tracing and DLSS. The card will support ray tracing, but the performance is going to be sub-par. The GTX 970 is based on older GPU architecture/maxwell, and it lacks Ray tracing cores.
TL;DR 970 doesent support it cause of the architecture/maxwell
 
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How about Radeon RX 570? Because AMD announced that one of their upcomming drivers will support Ray tracing/PTGI on CryEngine.

AMD has already claimed that all of its current DX12 graphics cards support ray tracing via Microsoft’s DXR fallback layer. On the driver level, the support will be there.

BUT, this Fallback layer is just an emulation layer provided by MS, which is capable of running on any "D3D12" compatible GPU. It was originally meant so that the developers can learn the API (with having obvious DXR compatibility), and it was hardly intended to be able to run any games as such.

Once Ray Tacing Turing HW came out in the market, it's development was kind of halted, as it was deemed unnecessary. That it is technically supported was never in question, the question is how fast they can do it and my guess is not very fast, otherwise they would've already talked about it and showed some examples.

But AMD is still free to provide DXR support through their D3D12 drivers though. Any D3D12 GPU is actually capable of running this DXR code, since it is just an extension of DirectCompute. Slow Performance remains a totally different issue though (imagine running the same operations on a GPU without specialized processors/cores). But as per one recent post, ""The fallback layer isn't maintained anymore and it's unlikely that developers will use the codebase for ray tracing support under GPUs which don't support DXR directly.""

But most importantly, DXR has never been an NVIDIA-exclusive thing. Every DX12-capable card can access and use it, it's just slow (depending on the HW).

Performance, however, appears to be underwhelming via this “emulation/software” method. This could explain why AMD has not enabled the real-time ray tracing fallback layer on its drivers as its GPUs currently lack hardware components that could accelerate the ray tracing calculations.

In short, and while theoretically AMD’s DX12 GPUs can support real-time ray tracing, chances are we won’t see the red team adding support to it for the foreseeable future (or at least until AMD releases GPUs that are capable of running RT games with acceptable framerates).
 
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Although you can run realtime ray tracing on non rtx cards, performance is atrocious. You would have to lower settings so much that it would far negate the visual benefits of raytracing.

As I said, rtx 2060 is the minimum for raytracing. Ray tracing doesnt even look great, so i dont think its worth spending the money on.
 
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