This week everybody seems to be announcing their software will support real-time ray-tracing for those with “Nvidia’s new RTX GPUs”, which at the consumer level means the GeForce RTX gaming graphics cards. Including DAZ Studio 4.12 (already enabled), Blender, and KeyShot (in the forthcoming version 9 in Autumn/Fall 2019).
In DAZ Studio 4.12, with “RTX On” according to DAZ you get…
RTX-accelerated ray tracing for both the interactive viewport and final renders … [with a claimed] 140 percent more performance in final frame rendering compared to previous generation GPUs, and an incredible 10.5x faster than CPU-only rendering.
Looks nice, but Amazon tells me that even a low-end budget gaming “GeForce RTX” is likely to cost me around £350, and that’s without a Power Supply Unit (PSU) upgrade to run it. An RTX version that’s going to last a few years starts at £700. Still, for a small commercial studio, that sort of amount could be written off against tax. Although I think I’d really need a new PC to go down that route. And that’s still some years away.