Nvidia just announced today that they are bringing real-time ray tracing to their GTX lineup of cards. This support will begin with a driver update currently slated for some time in April.

Get ready to have your framerates destroyed. Think about it this way: Nvidia's RTX cards have special hardware that is dedicated to handling the load of real-time ray tracing. Even with this special hardware, enabling real-time ray tracing still destroys framerates on these new cards.

Now they're going to add support for it on to their older cards? It will certainly make your game look pretty, but your framerate is going to get very, very hard. For instance, let's take a look at how the GTX 1080 Ti compares to the RTX 2080 with various hardware features enabled in Battlefield 5 at 1440P.


Ouch. Well, what about a game like Metro Exodus?


Ah, that sub-20 FPS goodness.

But, you don't have to take Nvidia's benchmarks as gospel. The update will arrive this April. So far, these are the cards that will have the real-time ray tracing support when that update drops:

If you have any of these cards, you will get "basic ray-tracing effects" with a low ray count. If you own any of the RTX cards, ie: any of the 20xx cards, you will get full support for real-time ray ray tracing including multiple, complex effects, and a high ray count.

You can read more about this over at the Nvidia website.