Optix part of the driver is like OpenGL / DirectX / Metal, but it’s for raytracing rather than rasterization. A pure CUDA ray tracer can’t take advantage of the RTX hardware units.
The latest builds now have support for 20xx GPUs:
Note this is not using OptiX or RTX hardware units, just CUDA.
I have done some basic benchmarking. So far on a Quadro RTX 6000 I got performance that is about as expected, when extrapolating the benchmark timing based on number of cores and clock rate.
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thanks a lot 
when will an official statement about all nvidia tech implementation be shared?
about rt cores for cycles? stacking vram between RTX cards for cycles? AI upscaling ? AI Denoizing? Eevee Real time ray tracing? PhysX 4.0?
no news since the tweet two weeks ago
I don´t understand what you say:
“A pure CUDA ray tracer can’t take advantage of the RTX hardware units.”
So cycles is not going to be able to use the RT units?
Not in it’s current state from cuda, we’d have to modify blender to use optiX which can use the RTX hardware.
Ah, Ok, but it will be possible, bretch scared me by a second! hehe
Well it is still a non trivial sizable job, it’s not as easy as a recompile with optix enabled and off we go…
Yes yes, I know, but it is possible with some time, I hope you don´t discard it, even when the results are not visible in 4 months, because it will be a gamechanger, I hope you could use a more “standard” way, like using some kind of Vulkan Raytracing engine compatible with any card, and make use of the RT cores, but also make use of the future RT cores from AMD for example, but in any case… it´s a game changer I´m sure
If Blender developers start working on features or they can become part of the roadmap then it will be public information. But these are no different than any other feature that we think would be good to have in Cycles, we don’t make special official statements about that, what Blender developers work on is already public.
If other people are working on something, we have to wait for them to share things.
@brecht i don’t know much about this, but isn’t best to first migrate to vulkan before making any developement on these ray-tracing cards? especially now apple dropped opengl support…unless you guys have no plans to migrate to vulkan anytime soon…sorry if i miss inforrmed.
Cycles can’t easily run on Vulkan, its shading language is quite limited compared to OpenCL or CUDA. It’s not at all obvious that it is a good idea to port Cycles to Vulkan.
EEVEE and OpenGL is a separate matter, it does not affect Cycles development.
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ah i see , thanks for the answer.
@brecht Nvidia just open-sourced (BSD licensed) PHYSX. I wonder if this is of interest for simulation in Blender (interactive mode etc.) I think it runs without GPU acceleration as well.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but are there any major issues with the RTX support in Cycles such as incompatible materials or visual glitches?
Second Question, has the open benchmark been updated to support the updated Cycles engine?
I’m not aware of any bugs specific to RTX cards.
The benchmark would be updated later.
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Are RTX cards now supported out of the box? I mean nothing specific about them just regular cycles / eevee rendering like you’d do in an older one ?
Yes, they are supported out of the box.
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you amazing amazing people
@looch keep in mind that what is supported is just the CUDA part, not RT Cores acceleration, it will work just like any 1080Ti but a bit faster (if the card is faster)
Cheers!
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yes that’s what i wanted to know and i’m alright with that, I just wanted to know if I could use cycles at all in my laptop