At the end of last week, Nvidia released a new Game Ready driver that unlocked their fancy pants real time ray tracing tech for GTX 10 and 16-series graphics cards, starting with the 6GB GTX 1060. Before that, you had to have a shiny new Nvidia RTX card to take advantage of all their realistic lighting effects in games such as Metro Exodus, Battlefield V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the cheapest of which is the still quite pricey 330 / $350 RTX 2060.
Technically, Nvidia’s GTX 10-series has always been able to do ray tracing – it’s just it’s never really been possible due to the sheer amount of graphical grunt involved to render it all in real time. And to some extent, it’s still not really possible – at least not in games such as the super intensive Metro Exodus, for example, which employs practically every current ray tracing technique under the sun. But in other games where developers have employed slightly lighter ray tracing techniques, such as the shadows in (you guessed it) Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it’s actually more feasible than you think – and I’ve been putting my 6GB GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 cards to the test to find out exactly what kind of speeds you can expect to see with ray tracing switched on.