Ray tracing on GTX cards is the medium popcorn of computer graphics

Nvidia announced today that it is unlocking DirectX Raytracing capabilities in its last-generation Pascal GPUs. Real-time ray tracing features like global illumination, reflections, and shadows were exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. But now you can turn on those features on video cards like the GTX 1080.

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang announced this news during his keynote address at the company’s GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. But the company briefed the press on the details of this news earlier in the day. During that session, the Nvidia explained that it wants to expand the potential audience for DXR. It acknowledged that RTX cards are inherently faster with ray tracing due to their specialized cores, but it wants to give people the option to run these features even if it wrecks performance.