DXR Support: GTX 1660 Ti Beats GTX 1080 in new Nvidia Benchmarks
Today marks the arrival of Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR) on Nvidia’s Pascal and non-RTX Turing cards. The company has released a new Game Ready driver that supports this feature, and with it come some really interesting performance benchmarks.
Before we start, I want to mention that since these benchmarks come from Nvidia itself, it’s best to take them with some skepticism. Still, they paint an interesting picture for the company’s newest architecture.
DXR Support Added to GTX-Series Graphics Cards: GTX 1660 Ti vs GTX 1080 Benchmarks
The benchmarks clearly show that the Nvidia RTX graphics cards dominate the performance scene. Even the GeForce RTX 2060 easily beats the GTX 1080 Ti. That makes sense considering the RTX cards have special cores to handle the real-time ray tracing in their AI-powered DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology.
The DLSS is given the dark green shading in the benchmark. The performance without DLSS is represented by the light green bar, and the RTX cards still pretty much dominate it as well.
What’s really interesting is the fact that the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti – the Turing card without Tensor or RT cores – overall beats the GTX 1080. Sure the 1080 wins in some scenarios, but the 1660 Ti wins more.
You may say that these performance figures are more or less in the margin of error, but for a card that overall loses to the GTX 1070, surpassing the 1080 in anything is impressive. Basically, it’s likely something to do with the faster RAM or another aspect of Turing beside the added cores.
Of course, this is only in the case when utilizing the ray tracing features, and Nvidia does have a reason for its newer cards to look better than the previous gen. I’ll wait for the third-party benchmarks to arrive before making a definitive statement.
Nvidia’s GeForce 425.35 WHQL driver is now available to the public, offering support for DirectX Raytracing on GeForce GTX 1060 (and higher) and GeForce GTX 1660 (and higher) GPUs. Those interested can download the driver from here.
