Last week, NVIDIA added DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) support to GeForce GTX series, from the GTX 1060 6GB up to recent GTX 1660 (this DXR support is available in GeForce 425.31). Following this news, 3DMark Port Royal has been updated to support GeForce GTX.
3DMark Port Royal is the world’s first dedicated real-time ray tracing benchmark for gamers. I tested Port Royal (January 2019) with a RTX 2080 and a RTX 2070. Compared to GeForce GTX, GeForce RTX GPUs embark some RT cores, which are dedicated hardware to accelerate ray tracing operations. GeForce GTX, in the other hand, do not have such specific hardware and must use general-purpose shader cores to perform ray tracing operations.
Let’s see how a GeForce GTX 1080 handles the Port Royal benchmark. I also re-tested the RTX 2080 (DLSS not enabled).
| Test System | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7-8700K @ 3.7GHz |
| Motherboard | GIGABYTE Z390 Gaming X |
| Memory | 16GB DDR4 Corsair Vengeance LED @ 3000MHz |
| PSU | Corsair AX860i |
| Storage | Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD |
| OS | Windows 10 v1809 64-bit |
| 6106 (graphics: 28.27 FPS) ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 OC 8GB – driver: 425.31  |
| 1592 (graphics: 7.37 FPS) ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080 8GB – driver: 425.31 |
Ouch! In regular graphics benchmarks, the RTX 2080 is more or less 30% faster than a GTX 1080. But here, the difference is abyssal. According to this test, real time raytracing on GTX series is rather… pointless!
Related links:
- New Drivers Enable Ray Tracing on NVIDIA GeForce GTX Graphics Cards
- Ray Tracing, Your Questions Answered: Types of Ray Tracing, Performance On GeForce GPUs, and More
