Does Sons of the Forest have ray tracing?

Sons of the Forest is the highly anticipated sequel to The Forest, and has been extremely well received by gamers and critics. However, you would be right in wondering if the game has ray tracing. Let’s get into it here.

Sons of the Forest is a game released exclusively on Steam, for now, and allows you to traverse through a post-apocalyptic world in which you fight monsters and ghouls alike. We’ve already had a look at what the best graphics settings are for the game, and even on the Steam Deck, but is ray tracing an option?

Firstly – let’s go over what ray tracing is. While it might sound exorbitant, flashy, and complicated, ray tracing is actually generally quite a simple concept. It’s the graphical simulation of realistic light rays and shadow casting in game, hence the name ray, tracing.

Read More: Best GPU for ray tracing – AMD and Nvidia graphics cards

It’s not a simple procedure for graphics cards to perform, in fact it was so impressive and resource-consuming that a whole new type of graphics cards had to be invented. These are the Nvidia RTX cards and Radeon RX cards, of which you can find the best graphics cards for ray tracing here.

To get the crux of the question though, Sons of the Forest doesn’t have ray tracing. At least, it doesn’t have ray tracing, yet. The game is still in early access and, as we’ve discussed in our Sons of the Forest dedicated server piece, there’s still the potential for the full game’s release to include all of the features that we’re curious about, ray tracing being one of them.

Read More: Best CPU for Sons of the Forest – AMD & Intel

However, we don’t particularly have our hopes up for Sons of the Forest getting ray tracing in the future. While most of the latest graphics cards support ray tracing – not all of the latest games support it. In fact, Atomic Hearts, which was marketed as a ray tracing game, actually launched without the feature, so it’s clearly not an easy concept to implement.

We’re going to be keeping an eye out for the latest updates on Sons of the Forest, specifically if we think that it’s going to get ray tracing anytime soon. Make sure to check back in with us periodically for the latest updates.

Frequently Asked Questions

Would ray tracing make Sons of the Forest run faster?

While the game doesn’t actually include the feature, if it did have it, it would reduce FPS as it would put more strain on the GPU and CPU.

Does Sons of the Forest have DLSS?

Sons of the Forest hasn’t got DLSS either, though this would be an easier feature to implement.