News Ray tracing now available on Nvidia GTX GPUs

$300 - 500 was pretty much the norm for high end GPUs back in the old days so technically it wasn't expensive.

What made the Geforce 3 TI 500 (and eve more so the Geforce 4 TI 4600) look expensive was that shortly after they came out ATI unleashed the best ever value for money GPU series in all of history with the R300 (And variants, from unlockable and heavily oc'able tweakers dream low end cards to the literally every bell and whistle high end All in Wonder variants).

Except now there won't be an R300 riding in on a red horse to save us all, so these days its cough up whatever Nvidia wants or accept console like gaming with the 17th rerelease of the RX 480.

 

I read somewhere, don't remember where exactly, that nobody should expect to run Metro Exodus on ultra + RT at 4K with the RTX 20xx or their successor cards. Finally we have a game that pushes hardware again. But the good thing for me is that it does that even without RT enabled. RT is just a gimmick right now, because Turing is nowhere ready to really run it at 4K.

 

A question here guys.
Does RT needs beefier CPU if enabled?

 

Inconclusive, but for today likely minimal impact to CPU load in practice.
Reduction in framerate (and therefore number of frames a CPU needs to process) from use of RT is likely more than the increase in complexity-per-frame from feeding the RT renderpath on RTX cards. Cards without dedicated hardware will see a much larger performance impact due to the CPU handling BVH traversal rather than dedicated hardware units, but its a moot point as cards without dedicated RT hardware will just go from "way to slow" to "still way to slow" regardless of CPU performance available. In general, adding an RT rendering path could be anywhere from "just use the existing assets and switch out bits of the pipeline" (minimal impact CPU-side) to deciding "raster is for losers, RT all the things!" which would have an unknown impact CPU-side and would - today - be a terrible idea beyond prototypes (which rarely have considerations for optimisation beyond the specific feature they're playing with, so are not representative).