NVIDIA RTX In Action – Ray Tracing Demos and FFXV DLSS

Given the RTX naming scheme of these new cards, its evident that a lot of the focus of this launch lays on NVIDIA's new RTX software features.

For those of you that haven't yet heard of RTX, you can give our architecture article a read, but essentially these new software SDKs provide a way to utilize the deep learning capabilities of the Tensor cores found in Volta, as well as the real-time raytracing capable RT cores.

While no shipping games have either the deep learning powered DLSS anti-aliasing technology, or the real-time ray tracing technology enabled, NVIDIA provided a few demo applications to test these technologies.

Final Fantasy XV Benchmark

For DLSS testing, NVIDIA and Square Enix provided an updated version of the Final Fantasy XV benchmark. While we were unable to set any custom settings, these benchmarks were both run at 4K, with the only image quality setting being TAA, the default AA option in the game, versus the new DLSS.

Using our capture equipment to test a 60-second portion of the beginning of the benchmark run, we recorded the average, 95th and 99th percentile frame rates with DLSS on and TAA on.

With DLSS enabled, we see a 36% gain in average frame rate versus TAA enabled with the RTX 2080 Ti.

It's nice to see DLSS working in the real world, but we would really like to get our hands on it in a scenario that is actually gameplay driven, and not a benchmark which never changes. Regardless, these performance results look promising for whenever DLSS-enabled games do ship.

Star Wars Reflection Demo

On the ray tracing side, we were provided by NVIDIA and the ILMxLab of a version of the Star Wars Reflection demo seen at GDC and the RTX launch event.

The video above was rendered in real time on our RTX 2080 Ti, with the default frame rate limited of 24FPS disable. Please note that the demo does maintain V-Sync on, despite an uncapped rendering frame rate.

3DMark Ray Tracing Preview

Another ray tracing demo we got a look at was from UL, makers of 3DMark. This demo is meant to be a preview of their upcoming benchmark that will make use of Microsoft's DirectX Ray Tracing APIs. This is still an early preview, but we are always delighted to see UL step up to the plate and develop benchmarks for new technologies.

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