At GDC 2019, real-time raytracing was one of the marquee features. Unreal was the first to market with DXR support added to Unreal Engine 4.22. Unfortunately it also required you to have one of the newest generation video cards, an RTX 2060, 2070 or 2080. Thankfully Nvidia also announced at GDC that they would be bringing DXR support to some older GeForce 10 series cards based on the Pascal architecture. Does this mean you can now do real-time raytracing development on a older Nvidia GPU? Let’s find out!
There are a few requirements before you can start:
- an Nvidia 1060 6GB, 1070 or 1080 card (or of course a RTX 2060+ card)
- Unreal Engine 4.22 or newer
- Nvidia Drivers, 425.31 ore newer
- Windows 10 Build 1809 or later
Be sure to launch Unreal Engine using the –dx12 flag, then enable raytracing in the project settings, the full process is documented here. Watch the entire process and the mixed results in the video below.
So can you do raytracing in Unreal Engine using older cards? Yes, yes you can… but the results aren’t perfect as of yet. Once you have your raytraced project up and running, check here for documentation on how to configure raytracing in your project.