Luckily, my Shadow of the Tomb Raider ray tracing results were a lot more promising, offering largely playable frame rates across more than just the lowest quality setting. Shadow of the Tomb Raider: GTX ray tracing performance As a result, Metro Exodus is probably more of a 'this is what the game could look like with a better graphics card' kind of deal rather than something you can realistically play with ray tracing from start to finish right now. Sadly, I don't currently have a GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1660 or GTX 1660 Ti to hand to see how they compare, but needless to say, I don't think even GTX 1080 owners will be able to manage much more than the settings I've described above. The GTX 1060 lurched between a completely unplayable 20-33fps, and even the GTX 1070 struggled to stay on the right side of the 30fps line with these settings, veering between chugging lows of 25fps to just about acceptable highs of 43fps. Switch on ray tracing, however (which only has the option of being High or Ultra, I should add), and man alive, I thought my PC had thrown itself into the white hot coal face of Metro's train engine. Without ray tracing enabled, the GTX 1060 was pulling down frames between 80-108fps most of the time, while the GTX 1070 was hitting highs of 127fps. To test each card, I jogged up and down the side of the train in the game's first open world area, the Volga, on Medium quality (ray tracing simply won't turn on if you put it on Low) at a 1920x1080 resolution with all the rest of Metro's graphics features either turned off or dialled right back to their lowest option. Metro Exodus: GTX ray tracing performanceĪnd without the dedicated ray tracing or RT cores you'll find on Nvidia's newer and more expensive RTX graphics cards, you may as well forget about playing a ray traced Metro Exodus on the GTX 1060 and GTX 1070, as it's simply too much to handle even on the lowest possible graphics settings. It still produces a considerable drop in performance, but it's nowhere near as intensive as Metro Exodus, for example, which uses ray tracing for both its ambient occlusion and global illumination systems in order to determine how bright every single light source and surface should be in any given scene. In both cases, the ray tracing workload is comparatively light. In Battlefield V, for example, ray tracing is only applied to the game's reflections, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider is only using it to render the shadows. 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.īefore we get started, it's worth reiterating exactly what these games are doing when we talk enabling their ray tracing support, as it's not necessarily doing the same thing in every ray tracing-supported game. 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. 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. 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 / $3. 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.
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