with the new drivers Nvidia has enabled ray tracing on GTX series cards.
Has WOW enabled ray tracing on these cards or are they disabled?
Don’t know, but these other threads guys in there may know
While you should, technically, be able to run ray tracing on the GTX cards that have driver support for it, it is not likely to be a worthwhile experience.
Kodiack, with his 2080ti and 9900k is experiencing ~45% performance hit, so it is likely to be awful on my 2070 and unplayable on any GTX. My plan is to turn it on, take some screenshots and turn it off until there are hardware improvements and software optimization that make it worthwhile. It’s nice that they’re working on it though…
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Thank yall. Yes… it essentially halves your frame rates. I just wanted to test it in some zones. Not leave it on. I was just curious if it is enabled for gtx cards. Running ray tracing at the moment is not worth the performance hit. I agree with y’all on that. I just wanted to be able to test it when I get my 1660 super. I won’t be able to afford rtx till late next year. So I will be keeping my 1660 super for a year before I upgrade.
1660 super is a great card… I upgraded from a 1050ti to the RTX 2070 and it’s been great (also went from 1080p/60hz to 1440p/144hz) and it was nice to be able to crank all the settings up. Like you, I’m looking forward to testing the ray tracing! 
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Honest question: where are people seeing that this supposedly enabled DXR support on GTX hardware? It’s not in the release notes anywhere, nor is it even mentioned in passing on the download page or release article.
My understanding was this was already possible previously anyway, but just plain not worth it due to the performance costs. I’m not exactly sure HOW it was enabled previously, mind, but I’ve never been in a position to test anyway as nothing I own uses DXR.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gtx-dxr-ray-tracing-available-now/
“have now also made it possible for gamers with GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and higher GPUs to test drive basic DirectX Raytracing (DXR) effects via a new Game Ready Driver”
This seems to remain true.
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Uhh… the driver that article links to… is from April 2019 - specifically 425.31.
No wonder I couldn’t find anything new related to this. It’s really, really old news (technologically speaking). Likely explains the old tests I’ve seen on the subject as well, since that would negate the need for any trickery.
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Absolutely… I don’t think we’ve seen new tests because there likely hasn’t been any significant optimization improvements for the GTX line.
My son’s old computer has a 1060 in it (my old rig has a 1050ti), so I might test it on his just to see how badly it performs when Shadowlands drops. Even with our RTX 2070s it’s not going to be playable.
I just got my 1660 super. Did all the updates and drivers and found out I cant enable ray tracing. Kind of sucks. But I didn’t buy the 1660 super to do ray tracing lol.
Its not worth it imo…not on gtx.
Also i read what wow has for ray tracing isnt even the full feature set of the tech.
Im gonna look it up , I’ll post the source.
So nvm…it was just a quote from “the instance” the host said its not the full feature of the tech just improved shadows.
But improved shadows IS ray tracing and i searched for a couple minutes to find corroborating information to post and didn’t.
I only have a 1080 so i might try it just for the heck of it but i wont play with it on. My fps hit will be to big.
Actually, you were correct! It is only ray tracing shadows - no reflections, etc. We were talking about it in these threads:
The only GTX cards that have hardware ray-tracing are the 1600 cards. Any other GTX card will take a huge hit when you’re forced to use software ray-tracing.
The 1600s don’t have the RTX hardware, or at the very least they have it severed (either physically or through firmware). Zero tensor cores, zero RT cores. That’s… that’s why they weren’t sold as more expensive, more profitable 2000-series cards.
They might still be Turing but they’ll suffer the same performance losses as Pascal if you try to use DXR.
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