Nvidia declared what it is dubbing “The Summer of RTX” as popular games like Doom Eternal, Rust, and Red Dead Redemption 2 prepare to introduce support for real-time ray tracing and the performance-enhancing Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) technology enabled by its latest GPUs.
Real-time ray tracing is used to improve a game’s lighting. DLSS offers a variety of improvements such as better performance, richer visuals, and lower latency, depending on how it’s implemented. Both technologies have been supported by Nvidia graphics cards since the company released the first products based on its Turing microarchitecture in September 2018.
Their benefits weren’t immediately available to gamers, however, because game developers still needed to adopt the technologies in their titles. But the list of titles that support real-time ray tracing, DLSS, or both has grown fairly consistently since the tools were introduced.
Nvidia said that 55 titles—including Minecraft, Fortnite, and other popular games—currently support DLSS. More will be added in the coming days: The company said DLSS support will reach Lego Builder’s Journey on June 22, Doom Eternal on June 29, and Rust on July 1. Other titles, including Red Dead Redemption 2, are expected to support the technology “soon.”
But support for real-time ray tracing and DLSS isn’t just expanding to new games; it’s also expanding to the software used to develop those titles. Nvidia said that a plugin meant to make it easier for developers to support the features in their games is now available for Unreal Engine 5, and a similar plugin is expected to debut alongside Unity version 2021.2 later this year.
Those engines will join Unreal Engine 4 and many first-party platforms, from the Frostbite engine used in the Battlefield series to the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) used in Red Dead Redemption 2, in helping game developers adopt Nvidia’s graphics technologies. In theory, these expansions should allow the list of games supporting these features to grow even faster.
Nvidia shared more information about the games adding support for real-time ray tracing and DLSS in June and July in a blog post. It also offers more information about how DLSS works, from its performance improvements to its latency reduction, on its website.
