"RTX cards don't have RT cores"

[AC5L4T3R]

With Nvidia now enabling Ray Tracing on Pascal cards, I'm seeing a few people saying Nvidia lied to us and the new RTX don't have "RT cores" at all and are just different cores being shut off by drivers.

Is there anyone from CG able to chime in on this?

[^Lele^]

As far as i know, DXR never needed RT cores to begin with, they just accelerated raycasting.
In fact, there was always a fallback code path to use for the cards without the acceleration hardware, but it was left largely unused so far.
Check it here (last change dated Oct. 2018.)

[savage309]

Every hardware that does some computations can be made with software at the cost of performance.

Best,
Blago.

[piotrus3333]

marketing semantics. I heard few days ago about real time rt on radeon in cryengine.

[AC5L4T3R]

So - do the cores actually exist and provide what Nvidia say they do?

[super gnu]

yes, since Chaos are seeing massive speedups using these cores. we can expect rtx accelerated vray soon

why would you suspect they dont exist? raytracing has been demonsntrated on gpus for years (how do you think vray works now?) .. it was just too slow for realtime use. they have used some clever software trickery to get reasonable realtime performance on standard gpu hardware, but rather like gaming on cpu only (i remmeber the days) its not as fast as specifically optimised hardware.

[oglu]

So - do the cores actually exist and provide what Nvidia say they do?

Sure they are. Tech nerds do teardows of those chips. They put them under microscopes each time they get a new one.
If they would find the same architecture nvidia would sabotage itself.

[AC5L4T3R]

I'm not doubting it. In fact I sourced CG's blog posts on various RT topics to show that companies are benefitting from the RT cores. I got in to discussion on another forum with a guy (and a bunch of others) who are claiming the RTX cards don't have RT Cores. So I was curious to ask people who actually have experience and not some basement dwelling neck-beard who thinks he knows it all because he installs Linux distro's at home.