NVIDIA Touts RTX In Nine New Games at Gamescom 2019

RTX has had some huge successes and some failures along it’s first year of penetration into the gaming market. At their presentation at Gamescom 2019, NVIDIA was showcasing nine new ray-tracing adoptions, demonstrating their persistence at getting ray-tracing built in to the next generation of games. There’s A LOT of comparison pictures of #RTXON vs OFF and gameplay trailers below for your enjoyment!

Minecraft

First on their list: Minecraft from ~~Mojang~~ Microsoft. Through third-party shader mods, like SEUS PTGI E6 shown in this video, Minecraft has had some support for a full path-tracing implementation. However, NVIDIA has been working with Minecraft’s developers to officially support RTX in Minecraft. However, there’s a caveat: this only applies to the Windows 10 edition of Minecraft, not console nor the popular Java-based version. The reason? RTX is actually implemented via DXR, the DirectX Ray-tracing abstraction layer. This means Minecraft ray-tracing should be vendor agnostic once AMD adds DXR support for their Radeon GPUs, but obviously in this case it is just handing the API calls off to NVIDIA’s RTX for this demo on NVIDIA hardware.

DXR will certainly add some benefit for improving gameplay visuals for people currently playing with Shaders on, as well as improving build highlight videos even more. The question still remains of how much of a performance impact this will have, but at least the trailer video shows apparently smooth camera motion.

Control

The highly anticipated Control, launching August 27, will have “the most advanced set of ray-traced effects seen to date.” This will feature more than the basic dynamic shadows and reflections some games have implemented, but feature realistic transparency, indirect diffuse lighting, and contact shadows. Control is also an RTX Bundle title, so you know NVIDIA gave it some extra attention during development.

Watch Dogs: Legion

We got our first look at Watch Dogs: Legion’s ray-tracing implementation for reflections (remember what we said about Control having the most advanced RTX features seen to date? It’s because most RTX-enabled games just implement reflections). Still, Watch Dogs has a great environment to really let those reflections shine.

Dying Light 2

Dying Light 2 just announced implementing RTX for lighting in particular, based on the screenshot provided. We’ll be hearing more about the details of their RTX implementation at a future date.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

The new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which releases October 25th, was showing off their new inclusion of RTX, focusing on “gritty realism.” It looks like they’ll only be implementing real-time ray-traced shadows from the RTX toolkit, as it’s the only feature explicitly stated and the screenshots do contain water that doesn’t look like it uses ray-traced reflections. RTX will be available in single-player and 2v2 Gunfight multiplayer mode.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

Since the original Bloodlines landed in 2004, The Vampire: The Masquerade franchise fanbase has been anticipating a second installment. A preview trailer was released alongside the RTX support announcement. Ray-traced reflections is the feature being utilized. You’ll notice, particularly on window glass, the reflections include full transparency. DLSS has also been implemented, which should help claw back some framerate that may be lost to RTX. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is expected to release Q1 2020.

Metro Exodus: The Two Colonels

Metro Exodus is receiving a DLC side-story called The Two Colonels. With this DLC, ray-traced global illumination lighting will be added to the game. Global illumination will also be applied to area lights, point lights, and emissive lights.

SYNCED: Off-Planet

Tencent annount their PvPvE co-op action game SYNCED: Off-Planet. They’re adding ray-traced shadows and reflections, which should make this “post-collapse” game very visually stunning indeed.