At this year’s Gamescom event, two forthcoming games heavily feature ray tracing as the means for producing the best possible graphics. Star Wars Outlaws and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle both have graphics features, either exclusively developed by Nvidia or are so demanding that only high-end GeForce RTX cards can really handle it.
Nvidia was the first GPU vendor to bring real-time ray tracing hardware to the gaming masses at another Gamescom in 2018, with its GeForce 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.
Take the recently launched Black Myth: Wukong. Its graphics are spectacular but to get the very best visuals, you need to enable a setting called Full Ray Tracing. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and it uses Lumen ray-traced global illumination by default. However, ‘full ray tracing’ is a path tracing algorithm.
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 in Cyberpunk 2077 or 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 have path tracing—sorry, Full Ray Tracing. Now, there’s no indication whatsoever that the option will only work on GeForce RTX cards but given how demanding it is, you can be pretty sure that just the likes of the RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4090 will 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.
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 Illumination or 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.
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I personally spend quite a bit of my free time messing about with DXR coding and using Lumen 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.
The latter is the best counterpoint to Nvidia’s dominance in the ray tracing industry as consoles are powered by AMD chips and developers that make games exclusively for that platform only need to think about how RDNA RT units handle it all.
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.
With regards to AMD’s desktop PC graphics cards, it’s expected that RNDA 4 will have improved ray tracing units but at the same time, it’s looking unlikely that there will be any high-end models sporting these chips.
As for Intel’s next-gen Battlemage 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.
