Yesterday, NVIDIA announced that Star Wars Outlaws, one of the year’s most anticipated game releases, would support NVIDIA DLSS 3 and Reflex on PC at launch. The game will also integrate NVIDIA’s RTX Direct Illumination alongside ray traced global illumination (RTGI) to offer what is being described as the most detailed Star Wars experience ever seen in a game, thanks to the combination of the Snowdrop Engine and NVIDIA’s technologies:
RTXDI figures out the most important light samples in Star Wars Outlaws to cast physically accurate ray-traced shadows. Performance remains fast thanks to RTXDI’s innovative design, and on GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs ray tracing gets even faster thanks to each card’s fourth generation, super fast Ray Tracing Cores.
So far, we’ve only seen RTXDI implemented in CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077 path tracing update, also known as RT: Overdrive. Studio Wildcard announced the technology’s implementation in the Unreal Engine 5 remaster ARK: Survival Ascended, but it doesn’t seem to be in the game yet.
As for Star Wars Outlaws, Tobias Carlsson, Technical Director at Ubisoft Massive, stated:
Here at Massive Entertainment, worldbuilding is a part of our DNA, and what better way to showcase our craft than creating the first-ever open world Star Wars game. Filled with distinct locations across the galaxy’s outer rim, both iconic and new, players will be able to experience the Star Wars underworld like never before. DLSS 3 gives us the performance headroom to bring our vision to life and to support additional ray tracing features, helping gamers fully immerse themselves in the adventures of Kay Vess and Nix.
Interestingly, there’s no mention of DLSS 3.5, which adds Ray Reconstruction. That is probably because the Snowdrop Engine already has a built-in denoiser, as shown in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Star Wars Outlaws will also be available through the GeForce NOW cloud platform. Users subscribed to the Ultimate tier will get to enjoy all of these features. As a reminder, Star Wars Outlaws doesn’t have a release date yet but is expected to launch this year on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
In other ray tracing news from NVIDIA at GDC 2024, Black Myth: Wukong will feature fully raytraced water caustics (which accurately render the refraction and reflection), global Illumination (ensuring that lighting indoors and outdoors is pixel perfect, darkening areas where light is occluded or doesn’t reach, and realistically illuminating the world by bouncing light). Moreover, contact hardening and softening fully ray traced shadows are cast everywhere, rendering the smallest shadows from leaves and pebbles and those from geometry-rich buildings, the main character, and the gigantic bosses that must be overcome.
