Glorious 20 FPS!
But there are some interesting questions about ray tracing on Pascal that we wanted to answer.
The first question is to what degree will Pascal embarrass itself?
Is a card like the Titan X faster than the slowest RTX GPU, the RTX 2060?
This would allow some gamers to genuinely try out ray tracing without being forced to view a slideshow.
We used our Core i9-9900K test rig for these benchmarks coupled with 16GB of DDR4 memory.
All the data has been gathered using the latest versions of the games with the latest drivers installed.
You’ll see the areas we’ve tested in each game as we get to them.
So for today’s testing we stuck to the Ultra mode.
But if you had gone by just the average performance, 47 FPS sounds alright, it sounds decent.
The actual experience of playing the game though, is far from that.
Moving to 1440p it gets even worse for the Titan X.
However once again, 1% lows get hammered, halving here from just low ray tracing.
On average it’s a little faster, and in the most intensive areas it’s a little slower.
In fact with a 1% low of 46 FPS the game is playable.
Performance still does fluctuate a lot but at least it’s not dipping to slideshow levels on the regular.
Would anyone sacrifice over 100 FPS at this resolution for this performance?
Probably not, but at least it’s possible to try it out.
The final game we’re looking at here isMetro Exodus, which uses ray traced global illumination.
A 30 FPS average with a 1% low of 23 FPS is not good.
And in this game there is no ray tracing level below Highl so you could rule out Pascal entirely.
So what does this investigation tell us overall?
Nvidia couldn’t have brute-forced ray tracing by cramming in more CUDA cores.
The data does show that ray tracing with RT core acceleration is more efficient.
Finally we must wonder, why has Nvidia bothered testing and enabling ray tracing on Pascal?
We have two theories as to why: The first is for developers.
Second: plain old marketing to incentivize RTX GPU upgrades.
