Mass Effect Andromeda feature 4
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Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Mass Effect Andromeda, Quake 4 & more with Ray Tracing Global Illumination

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Another week, another article about PC games running with Pascal Gilcher’s Reshade Ray Tracing Global Illumination solution. This Reshade works on both AMD’s and NVIDIA’s hardware, meaning that everyone can get a taste of Ray Tracing (though this implementation is more of a hack and not as great as RTX). Below you can find Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Mass Effect Andromeda and STALKER: Clear Sky running with it, as well as some extreme Ray Tracing examples for both Quake 4 and Crysis.

Going into more details, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and STALKER: Clear Sky look really great with the new real-time ray tracing global illumination effects. The additional ambient occlusion effects work great in this particular title, and you will immediately notice the additional light bounce on multiple surfaces.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided Screen Space Ray Tracing 1440p + GTX 1070ti

S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky Screen Space Ray Tracing 1440p + GTX 1070ti

Mass Effect Andromeda also benefits from this Reshade, however – and like most third-person games – it suffers from some minor visual issues. For instance, Ryder is surrounded by a black shadow-ish effect caused by Reshade’s ray tracing/path tracing implementation. My guess is that you will be able to reduce this graphical issue by lowering the ambient occlusion settings, though this was also affect the rest of the image.

Mass Effect Andromeda Screen Space Ray Tracing 1440p + GTX 1070ti

On the other hand, I was really disappointed by Quake 4. Quake 4 looks similar to Doom 3 and I was expecting a pretty big visual improvement with this Reshade mod. However, it appears that the visual differences are very subtle. Not only that, but the image gets a bit darker (to be honest, I was expecting it to be a bit brighter due to the additional light bounces). Do note that the following video shows an extreme test with 32 ray tracing rays, and does not represent the performance you’ll be getting in normal values. Not only that, but Jose cangrejo used an NVIDIA GTX1070Ti so all of the featured games here can run way faster on more powerful GPUs.

Quake 4 32 Rays Extreme test (Screen Space Ray Tracing )

Last but not least, Jose cangrejo also shared an extreme test video for the first Crysis game, in which he also used 32 ray tracing rays. Contrary to Quake 4, Crysis sees a noticeable visual improvement, however we don’t know whether it’s worth – at least for now – using these extreme values. In the future, and when more powerful GPUs are available to the market, I can see gamers using these extreme settings in order to play these old games (which is really cool in my opinion).

Crysis 32 Rays Extreme test (Screen Space Ray Tracing )

Enjoy!