It's not the RT cores being used but the Tensor AI cores.Interesting. A more than 6X performance increase.I posted this three weeks ago regarding upgrading from a GTX 1660 Super to a RTX 3070TI:Ray tracing cores? I don't know for sure, but I doubt that.The clue is in the name "AI" Denoise. For that you need Ray Tracing cores and Tensor cores. RTX has those, again the clue is in the "RT". The GTX doesn't have that stuff.
I believe that people have done well with the GTX 16X0 series, which are Turing cards (like the RTX 20X0 series), but without the hardware raytracing features.
(I've never owned one of the GTX 16X0 cards, personally. I went straight from a GTX 970 to an RTX 3000 series card.)
Today before my new nVidia RTX 3079TI card arrived, I did a carefully timed test on a 10,000 ISO image with lots of noise. The rig is a I7-8700K, 64GB ram and Win 10 pro. I had the noise reduction setting at 59. The first test was with the GTX1660S in the computer, the second is with the new RTX 3070TI:
1660S - Expected time 1 min, Actual time 1:10
3070TI - Expected time 10 sec, Actual time 11sec.
The exact same image was used for the comparison.
The 3070TI times are very similar to what I'm getting on the same image on my MBP 16" 64GB M1 Max that I principally use for travel.
nVidia's specs for their past few generations of GPUs are here .
The 4070 ti has 12GB of VRAM, 7680 CUDA cores, and a 192 bit memory bus. The GTX 1660S has 6GB of VRAM, 1408 CUDA cores, and the same VRAM bus width.
(CUDA cores aren't associated with raytracing, as far as I know. They are mentioned for GPU computing.)
If you'd gone from a GTX 1660S to an RTX 2060, you'd have made the closest comparison of an RTX card to a similar card that lacks hardware raytracing. The lowest-end version of the 2060 still has more Cuda cores than the 1660S.
This is more important when looking at the various RTX cards as NVIDIA gives performance metrics for each... though something to also keep in mind is that TFLOPS doesn't always equal TFLOPS when moving to new architectures.
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