Borderlands 3 has just been released on the PC and although it is using Unreal Engine 4, it does not take advantage of Ray Tracing. However, YouTube’s ‘Digital Dreams’ has shared a video, showing the game running with Pascal Gilcher’s Ray Tracing Reshade in 4K.
This Reshade is using ray/path tracing techniques in order to enhance a game’s Global Illumination effects. In short, this is a post-process effect that comes with some limitations. Still, it will give you an idea of the improvements that RT would had brought to the table.
As we can see, this Ray Tracing Reshade can improve the visuals of even modern-day games like Borderlands 3. This is evident in the game’s “shadow-y” places, where there is no direct sunlight. However, this Reshade also brings a huge performance hit.
While Digital Dreams has not revealed any framerate figures, we can clearly notice how choppy the game runs when the Ray Tracing Reshade mod is active. It’s worth noting that Digital Dreams used an NVIDIA GTX1080TI. Moreover, Reshade has a lot of settings for its Ray Tracing Global Illumination effect. Therefore, it may be possible to run Borderlands 3 with RT on more powerful GPUs, provided you dial down the Ray Tracing Reshade settings.
Obviously, this isn’t as great as having native support for Ray Tracing. Still, and given that Gearbox may never add such a thing, it’s good knowing that there is a way to simulate these Ray Tracing effects.
As a bonus, I’ve also included below two more Ray Tracing Reshade videos. The first one shows Black Ops 3, whereas the second showcases Advanced Warfare.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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