NVIDIA has released two new trailers for Metro Exodus and Atomic Heart, detailing their real-time ray tracing features. Both of these first-person games will be among the first that will support real-time ray tracing via NVIDIA’s RTX technology.
Going into more details, Metro Exodus will have real-time ray traced global illumination and that’s it. No ray traced shadows or ray traced reflections/refractions like those we’ve seen in Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Battlefield 5. And while this effect is cool, it’s a bit underwhelming witnessing only one graphical effect being handled by ray tracing for the recently announced high-end graphics card that costs more than $1000.
Atomic Heart, on the other hand, will feature real-time ray traced reflections and refractions, similar to those of Battlefield 5. However, we did not see any real-time ray traced shadows or real-time ray traced global illumination.
At this point, it appears that developers only use real-time ray tracing for only one graphical effect. We are not certain why this is happening but so far most games that were showcased are using ray tracing for very specific things, and almost none of them uses it for more than one effect.
For example, Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses ray tracing only for shadows, Assetto Corsa, Battlefield 5, Atomic Heart and some other games use ray tracing only for reflections and refractions, and Metro Exodus uses ray tracing only for global illumination. The only game that will support more than one ray tracing graphical effect is Remedy’s Control with its glossy Ray Traced Reflections, Ray Traced Diffuse Global Illumination and Contact Shadows.
We don’t know whether this is a limitation or whether the developers have simply decided to focus on different areas, however we were expecting more from the RTX 2080Ti. After all, you can’t really justify buying a $1300 GPU in order to have proper reflections in one game, proper global illumination in another game, and proper shadows in another game. We were kind of expecting all of these graphical effects to be present in the games supporting RTX and from the looks of it, that won’t be the case for the majority of games!
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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