HardwareGraphics CardsWith Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Black Myth: Wukong, and Star Wars Outlaws, ray tracing in games is slowly becoming an Nvidia-exclusiveWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
HardwareGraphics CardsWith Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Black Myth: Wukong, and Star Wars Outlaws, ray tracing in games is slowly becoming an Nvidia-exclusiveWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
Nvidia was the first GPU vendor to bring real-time ray tracing hardware to the gaming masses at another Gamescom in 2018, with itsGeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards. But since then, AMD and Intel have both followed suit, and all new gaming PCs and consoles are more or less capable of ray tracing. Most PC gamers are well aware that Nvidia’s GPUs can do ray tracing faster than the competition but three games show that Nvidia is doing its best to push the technology to new heights—and very much in its favour.
If you’re a hardware enthusiast, you’ll already know about path tracing but even if you don’t, you may well have already come across it inCyberpunk 2077or more recently,a mod for Doom 2. Path tracing is actually a whole bunch of different algorithms but the general idea is that it’s a means to let developers push the amount of ray tracing taking place, without utterly tanking the performance. It’s still very demanding but the results are super impressive.
At Gamescom 2024, it was announced that the forthcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game will also havepath tracing—sorry, Full Ray Tracing. Now, there’s no indication whatsoever that the option willonlywork on GeForce RTX cards but given how demanding it is, you can be pretty sure that just the likes of theRTX 4080 SuperorRTX 4090will be able to run at a decent frame rate.
Mind you, Black Myth: Wukong runs quite well with path—darn it—Full Ray Tracing enabled on mid-range RTX graphics cards, as long as you keep the resolution down and use lots of upscaling and frame generation. In theory, AMD and Intel GPUs should run it too but my own testing showed that the performance hit is far too big to make it worth using.
(Image credit: Nvidia/Lucasfilm)
And then there’s Star Wars Outlaws, which is due for release August 30. That doesn’t have Full Path Tracing (I’m going to call it FRT from now on) but it does feature an Nvidia technology:RTX Direct Illuminationor RTXDI, for short.
Now, any GPU that supports DirectX Ray Tracing 1.0 (aka DXR) or better can run this algorithm but, while I’m not allowed to give any specifics, I’ll give you just one guess as to which GPU tech runs it the best, in terms of raw speed and lack of bugs.
Image1of4(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
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(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
(Image credit: Nvidia/GameScience)
I personally spend quite a bit of my free time messing about with DXR coding and usingLumen in Unreal Engine 5, so it’s clear that I’m somewhat biased when it comes to having an opinion on the use of ray tracing in games. But if more and more games start to feature FRT as being the only way to get the best possible graphics or utilise more of Nvidia’s APIs for ray tracing, I am a little worried that the whole thing is slowly becoming a one horse race.
Not that ray tracing is a race, of course, but let’s be honest here—the technology is going to be used increasingly more in games, especially the big-budget ones, and consoles are only going to become more capable in this aspect.
(Image credit: Nvidia/Ubisoft)
But in the world of PC gaming, it’s pretty much RTX all the way, be it hardware or software, right now. That’s great news if you’re an Nvidia shareholder, less so if you have an Arc or Radeon graphics card.
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
Your next upgrade
(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
(Image credit: Future)
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
With regards to AMD’s desktop PC graphics cards, it’s expected thatRNDA 4 will have improved ray tracing unitsbut at the same time, it’s looking unlikely that there will be any high-end models sporting these chips.
As for Intel’s next-genBattlemage GPUs—well, with the senior management hell-bent on saving big chunks of money, there’s a chance that the hardware is fine but the software support won’t be as good.
Don’t get me wrong, Nvidia has made some pretty amazing stuff for PC gaming, be it hardware or comprehensive software kits. But I rather hope that hope that game developers just use Black Myth: Wukong as inspiration for what modern graphics can look like, rather than being the best way to implement ray tracing.
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