You won’t need to sell your house to experience ray tracing after all. NVIDIA announced at GDC 2019 that ray tracing support will release for all GTX 10 Series GPUS from 1060 all the way up to the Titan XP with an official driver update next month.
The short of it is that you won’t need to purchase any of the new RTX GPUS to see the ray tracing tech running but the downfall will be that the new RTX cards are three to four times faster than the GTX ones due to their dedicated RT cores.
NVIDIA revealed that the tech will perform ray tracing calculations such as Bounding Volume Hierarchy, Ray Tracing and triangle intersection on their shader cores which will allow the tech to use render and calculate the ray tracing effects.
The tech was demonstrated running on Metro Exodus where NVIDIA explained that the Pascal GPUS are a lot slower at ray tracing than Turing cards. Even the powerful GTX 1080 Ti is a lot slower than the RTX 2080 at things like ray tracing and DLSS.
The fact that NVIDIA is releasing support for the tech on older hardware is good on them. This could be after Crytek showed the tech running on AMD hardware but regardless, the feature will add value to your already-overpriced gaming cards.
