First performance tests of the gtx 1080 in ray tracing

NVIDIA released the graphics drivers that allow the GTX 10 'Pascal' series to enjoy DXR Ray Tracing effects, which were previously exclusive to the RTX 'Turing' series. The first performance tests were swift using a GTX 1080, and the results are not very encouraging, as we already intuited.

GTX 1080 performance comparison with Ray Tracing

The tests were carried out by Wccftech and the RTX 2060 graphics cards and the modest GTX 1660 were used to make a comparison against the GTX 1080. The processor used was an i9-9900K @ 5 GHz combined with 16GB of DDR4 memory. In the comparison we can also see that the new technical demonstrations of NVIDIA have been included; Atomic Heart and Justice.

Performance comparison @ 1080p

	Atomic Heart	Battlefield v	Justice	Exodus Metro	Shadow of the Tomb Raider
RTX 2060	47 fps	62 fps	59 fps	78 fps	69 fps
GTX 1080	19 fps	45 fps	24 fps	49 fps	59 fps
GTX 1660	21 fps	40 fps	26 fps	33 fps	48 fps

In the Atomic Heart demo, the GTX 1080 suffers and cannot reach 30 fps on average, plus it suffers from phenomenal drops down to 7 fps, the same with the GTX 1660. The RTX 2060 is much more prepared.

In Battlefield V with a setting of 'High' and DXR in 'Low', the GTX 1080 reaches 45 fps on average, the RTX 2060 easily exceeds 60 fps. The drop in 1080 performance is not as steep here, with 31 fps being the lowest.

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Justice is another demonstration of intensive use of Ray Tracing, and again the shortcomings of the GTX 1080 are seen, which barely reaches 24 fps with drops to 12 fps. The RTX 2060 is much more prepared, with an average of almost 60 fps. Beware of this data, the GTX series does not support DLSS, which affects the results of the RTX 2060, which with DLSS could yield much more here.

Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider are games that make use of Ray Tracing, but in a somewhat more discreet way. The GTX 1080 gives 'acceptable' performance with 49 and 59 fps on average, respectively, with settings at 'High' and DXR at 'Medium'.

Conclusions

The performance penalty for applying Ray Tracing effects in games, outside of Shadow of the Tomb Raider with a single point of light, is quite substantial and gives us at least a clue to the usefulness of the RT cores found in the RTX 2060. The usefulness of RT cores is more than evident when looking at the performance of Metro Exodus, Justice and Atomic Heart.

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