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Following on from the recent news that the game isn’t going to have the feature on launch, you’d be forgiven for asking if ray tracing is coming to Atomic Heart at all.
Mundfish’s latest game released on February 21st. Atomic Heart is a First Person Shooter in a Utopian setting, where humans and robots finally live side-by-side. The game is obviously inspired by the works of Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, and rightly follows in their narrative footsteps as things soon take a dangerous turn.
Despite the game receiving fairly neutral reviews, there’s been one controversy that really stands out. The game was marketed as a showcase for ray tracing, though the release edition doesn’t even include ray tracing. At least, not yet.
Ray tracing is a graphical rendering procedure that simulates the behaviour of light rays in game. Nvidia have been using Atomic Heart as an example for GeForce RTX real-time ray tracing for nearly five years now. The video description for the games RTX showcase even says the following: “REAL-TIME ray tracing is coming to Atomic Heart,” and it seems that they weren’t really lying. Despite the game having launched, ray tracing is coming to Atomic Heart, just much later than we had initially expected.
Is ray tracing coming to Atomic Heart?
Upon the launch of the game, fans including Rock Paper Shotgun’s James Archer, noticed that ray tracing wasn’t an option in-game. After reaching out to the game’s PR team, this was the response: “The devs will be looking into implementing this post-launch.”
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This isn’t quite in line with what the gameplay and tech demos revealed over the years have suggested, though it’s better than nothing. At least it’s coming one day, though we just don’t know exactly when.
‘Post-launch’ is a very vague time-frame, so we can only really speculate when it’s coming, and even at that, we have nothing substantial to go off. A Plague Tale Requiem, for example, only received ray tracing months in advance. If that’s anything to go off, we’re not seeing Atomic Heart receive ray tracing for a while either.
We’re going to be keeping an eye out for the latest updates on Atomic Heart’s ray tracing situation, though in the meantime you might be interested in the best GPUs for ray tracing, which might prepare you for any eventual updates to the game. Make sure to check back in with us periodically for the latest gaming and hardware updates.
