Diablo 4, Dragon’s Dogma 2, and Horizon Forbidden West are all getting Nvidia's RTX enhancements
PC players on Nvidia hardware will be able to enjoy a suite of extra features in some big upcoming games.
As part of a wide-ranging CES conference update, PC graphics behemoth Nvidia has revealed a further expansion of its ‘RTX’ support in gaming - which could be huge for the performance of the included titles on PC.
At CES, Nvidia announced another fourteen titles that’ll be joining the family of games with ‘RTX’ features, allowing those with the latest Nvidia graphics cards to experience better performance and visuals.
Leading the pack is Diablo 4, which will receive both Ray Tracing and DLSS support.
Sony’s PC version of Horizon Forbidden West will support DLSS3, as will new social MMO Pax Dei.
Also joining the RTX-compatible family, but with as-yet unconfirmed features, are Dragon’s Dogma 2, Tekken 8, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (and The Man Who Erased His Name), Enshrouded, Starminer, Throne and Liberty, Gray Zone Warfare, Nakwon Last Paradise, Layers of Fear – and a new ray-traced 4K update for Half Life 2.
All of these games join the existing 500+ titles and apps featuring RTX support so far, which includes everything from Adobe’s suite of creativity apps to things like Alan Wake 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Fortnite, Alan Wake, and more.
Ray Tracing is fairly self explanatory at this point - it’s realistic lighting where each ‘ray’ of light is - you guessed it - ‘traced’, in order to create realistic shadows, reflections, and other lighting ambience. RT has been a major feature on the current-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles, but the technology is a step ahead on PC.
DLSS, meanwhile, stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling. This is an AI-powered addition, where essentially Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards can render a game at a lower resolution, but then have an AI upscale it with such smarts and clarity that it’s difficult to differentiate from native-resolution content. This pairs well with ray tracing, which has a habit of tanking frame rates. For instance, you may turn on full ray tracing in a game like Cyberpunk, but rather than run the game at 4K and see a flattened frame rate, run it at 1080p. DLSS takes over, however, and upscales that image to a 4K output which is relatively indistinguishable from a native 4K render. It’s genuinely quite astonishing.
RTX features are available across Nvidia’s ‘RTX’ branded GPUs, which first arrived with the RTX 20 cards back in 2018. Since then, we’ve had the 30 and 40 series cards - with the line-up expanding and shuffling today with the launch of ‘SUPER’ 40 series cards.