 We all know by now that the RTX launch sucked. Hard. Hard enough to almost smell like an unabashed cash grab. I mean, this is Nvidia's most expensive generation ever. And what do we get? Even, hang on, when did this thing launch? It's been eight months, and ray tracing is still only supported by three games and two tech demos. But hold on a minute. Now DXR or DirectX ray tracing is also available on GTX cards. So the question we have to ask is, was it all just a scam to get us to spend more on their shiny new cards? Let's take a closer look, shall we? AMP by Qt Coders is the easy way to create and manage your game servers. It supports dozens of applications, runs on both Windows and Linux, and is simple to install. Check it out at the link in the video description. The fact that only a few games support RTX is important because each game's implementation uses ray tracing in a different, somewhat limited way. More on that in a bit. That said, we can get a good idea for how well ray tracing on GTX cards will work. And we can finally give you guys some tangible numbers and show you exactly what kind of value RTX brings to the table. But first, the obvious question. Did Nvidia scam early adopters by hiding Pascal's ray tracing support behind a software lock? Now the answer boils down to the DXR fallback layer that Microsoft baked into DirectX 12. It allows ray tracing calculations to take place on a standard GPU shader cores rather than requiring dedicated hardware like the RT cores that RTX cards have. That means that GPUs with the necessary spec can barely have DXR fallback support exposed in the driver. So, yes, Nvidia did technically artificially lock ray tracing out of the Pascal cards. But the flip side to that is that this fallback layer requires some significant optimization to gain acceptable performance. So Nvidia would have had to put in some significant work to the driver level just beyond just enabling it. And I'll leave you guys to debate whether they should have waited on that one in the comments section, because today we have some RTX-less ray tracing to test. So we grabbed our GPU test bench along with four cards. Repping GTX, we've got the Pascal-based GTX 1080 Ti and Turing-based GTX 1660 Ti, going up against the RTX 2080 and RTX 2060. First, let's take a closer look at ray tracing and see for ourselves whether or not it actually makes a huge difference in our games, or if traditional tricks are still good enough. As I alluded to earlier, each of the three titles available does something different. So let's start off with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where rays are only traced to, appropriately enough, give us dynamic shadows and not for reflections or global illumination. This is perhaps the simplest use of the technology as it relies only on the position and number of dynamic light sources for calculation. But simple is a very deceptive term here, because they take into account every light source, candles, spotlights, area lights, and even sunlight. As a result, shadows are natural-looking and cast realistically across surfaces in ways that elude even the most sophisticated shadow maps or shadow volumes, techniques that most games have used up until now. Moving on to Battlefield V, our rays are used not for shadows, but for reflections. Because rays need to be traced for everything in the scene to accurately portray a reflection, this can be an intensive operation, depending on the number and size of reflective surfaces visible, as evidenced by the initial release of the game. Too many surfaces were incorrectly being processed as though they were reflective, and this caused a major performance hit that has since been fixed. So what's the image quality like? There are reflections without DXR, of course, but these non-traced reflections rely on the screen space. So if an object isn't on your screen, it's not being reflected. With DXR enabled, however, you get a more accurate and more useful reflection, potentially showing you things that are outside of your field of view. Usually this isn't a big deal for gameplay, but being able to see enemies on the reflection of a window, for example, has probably saved at least a few digital butts from getting hurt online. Finally, the most intensive scenario, Metro Exodus. This game uses ray tracing for global illumination, which means all light sources and resulting shadows are calculated via DXR, which in turn means there's a significant amount of number crunching required in order to actually run a game like this. That's not to say that the standard rendering engine looks bad, it's far from it. In fact, the effect that DXR adds to Metro Exodus can at times be quite subtle and difficult to discern, especially underground. The biggest advantage that ray tracing lends to Metro, therefore, is lighting accuracy, or how light reflects and refracts around the scene to create a realistically lit environment, particularly above ground with the game's day and night cycle. Ambient occlusion, which can often otherwise be somewhat jittery and inaccurate, is taken care of essentially the same way as Shadow of the Tomb Raider's shadows, creating a much more immersive feel. Of course, nothing is without trade-offs, and when we look at our performance results, well, as expected, enabling DXR and Shadow of the Tomb Raider resulted in a larger performance impact on our GTX cards than on RTX, but overall, the frame rates are quite playable. When we move on to Battlefield V, again, we're still playable, but our GTX 1080 Ti, by comparison to traditional rendering, tanks its frame rates so hard that it's basically halved. But we ain't seen nothing yet. It's when we try our GTX cards on Metro Exodus where things get messy. Even the GTX 1080 Ti struggled to give us cinematic frame rates at 1080p, while our RTX 2060 doubled that, and our RTX 2080 averaged over 100 FPS, all of which means if you're planning to stick with Pascal and want to use DXR, you should pay close attention to what exactly a game's rays are being used for. Shadows and reflections, probably fine. Global illumination, to quote Hardware Canucks, don't bother. So is it worth it? Well, while GTX owners can run DXR, the computationally expensive global illumination method is the direction more impressive games will try to take, and as a result, RTX cards will gradually claim their place in the market for their enthusiasts, and eventually may even become a necessity. Whether your upgrade path is Team Green or Team Red, when Navi-based radions launch with DXR support, chances are you'll be doing so sooner than later if you want the best graphics in your games, and these games are coming. We spoke with Epic Games engineering director, Marcus Wasper, and while the complexity of Unreal Engine meant that it took both his team and NVIDIA the better part of a year to get it implemented, from here on out, game developers using UE4 are finally going to have that it just works experience NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Wong, was talking about without interfering with traditional baked light mapping techniques. Taken together, support like this in Unreal Engine and other popular game engines means that there's no significant increase in workload for developers, so content creators can more easily create DXR enabled games for us consumers. Whatever their reasoning, rather than transform the landscape overnight, in my opinion what NVIDIA did with RTX was race out ahead of the competition and kickstart the ray tracing conversation. How many people actually cared when Microsoft announced DXR back in March of 2018? Did anyone think that hardware would be able to implement it so soon? I sure didn't, and it certainly caught AMD off guard if Median 7 is any indication, and now that the next generation consoles are coming, and even they are rumored to have ray tracing capabilities. So while this might not have been the ray tracing generation, it's truly set us up for the next one. The Volta XL charging USB cable uses reversible N52 grade neodymium magnets with USB-C tips. It provides instant power and it's got PBV braiding for flexibility and strength. They feature intelligent strain relief collars and can handle up to 87 watts of charging. So that means you can charge a MacBook Pro 15 inch, a Nintendo Switch, a Pixel 3 XL, and more. You can also use it for on the go charging using one smartphone to charge another. It comes in three different lengths, half, one, and one and a half meters. So check it out at the link in the video description. Thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or check out the link to where to buy some of the stuff we featured in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.