During our fifth and last pre-release interview with Atomic Heart game director Robert Bagratuni, we were told that consoles would not support ray tracing at launch.
We thought that implied the PC version would carry on as promised. After all, Mundfish and NVIDIA had paraded ray traced features since the very announcement of the first-person shooter game.
Here’s a GeForce RTX video unveiled at Gamescom 2018, when NVIDIA confirmed the presence of ray tracing for shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion.
Here’s a few choice quotes from that article:
[…] Most noticeably, Ray Traced Reflections add accurate, real-time reflections to Atomic Heart’s curved objects and surfaces, to its super shiny labs, to its water, and to numerous other game elements.
Similarly, the implementation of Ray Traced Shadows enables the casting of more accurate, more complex shadows that are rendered based on the properties of the scene.
And with regards to Ambient Occlusion, the previously-used Screen Space technique left small physical details lit too brightly, or large occluded areas too dark. With Ray Tracing, detail can be shadowed on a per-pixel basis, generating perfect, completely-accurate Ambient Occlusion shadows.
Following that unveiling, NVIDIA and Mundfish even released a downloadable Atomic Heart RTX Tech Demo at CES 2019. While the link doesn’t work anymore, you can check it out in the video below.
Our first interview with Bagratuni dates to only a few days later. At that time, he said the implementation of ray tracing in Atomic Heart hadn’t been daunting. Moreover, he proclaimed ray tracing was the future of graphics.
Doing real time ray tracing sounds like a daunting task on the surface, but the reality was much less intimidating. When we found out there was a special branch of Unreal with ray tracing support we were excited to see how it would improve Atomic Heart. NVIDIA provided us with access to the branch and the tools we needed to execute. They were there to help us when we needed it. The integration went fairly smooth considering it is running on new hardware and a new API and doing something that could never be done in real time before. The results blew us away.
Unfortunately, some people seem preoccupied with frame rates, but it should not overshadow the fact that real time ray tracing in games is a big, big deal for developers and it was impossible to do until just recently. It is way too early in our development process to be focusing on frames per second and performance. Plus, we are using ray tracing for three elements: reflections and refractions, shadows and ambient occlusion. Even with all that ray tracing, the performance is already good, and we expect further improvement as we progress through the development to release. We are working very closely with NVIDIA on optimising the game. Atomic Heart also will use NVIDIA DLSS so we are seeing performance improves from that, also.
[…] ray tracing delivers jaw-dropping lighting effects. It is truly going to change the way games are created.
In August 2020, during our second interview, Bagratuni said ray traced reflections and shadows would ‘stay for sure’.
We’re working closely with NVIDIA to make the most beautiful game world you’ve seen. Solutions we’ve shown you previously are ray-traced reflections and shadows. They stay for sure. Currently, we’re working on the implementation of DLSS and other features recently made possible due to RTX and DX12.
Just a year ago, in our third interview, we were told that Atomic Heart would even feature the newly released RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) in some places.
Yes, we’re using RTX GI at some places in the game, where it is most justified, and we really like what it brings to the game.
Lastly, in our fourth interview released in early January, we inquired about the RTX Direct Illumination feature. Bagratuni said it wouldn’t be available at launch.
Not yet, but we are working closely with NVIDIA to make this happen in the future with one of the game updates.
This would have been a good time to let us know that all the other ray tracing features discussed for years wouldn’t be available at release either.
Indeed, when I got my hands on the game, I didn’t see any explicit ray tracing option. I thought it might have been absorbed into the regular settings for some weird reason and asked for clarification. At last, only a few hours before the game’s launch, we received a clear answer: Atomic Heart won’t have ray tracing for now. The exact quote is:
Following the launch, we’ll revisit the needs of our gamers.
In the review-in-progress, I noted that Atomic Heart looks good and performs extremely well. It is possible that Mundfish decided to pull ray tracing out of the final build because the performance would have suffered for most PC users (those without access to the RTX 40 GPUs, for instance), but this contradicts earlier statements where we were told that ray tracing performance was already good years ago. The reviewer guide provided by NVIDIA also mentions an ‘RT Ultra’ preset that doesn’t exist in the build I checked out, again pointing to a recent decision to remove the ray traced features from the game.
At any rate, there’s no doubt communication about its availability at launch should have been clearer and its timing more appropriate than it has been from both Mundfish and NVIDIA. It’s also the first time something like this happened, as far as memory goes; hopefully, it doesn’t become a trend.
