NVIDIA Shows Off Modern Warfare And A Slew Of Other New Games In Blazing Ray Traced Glory
Real-time ray tracing is headed to more games. That includes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the upcoming title slated for an October 25, 2019 release. In partnership with Activision and Infinity Ward, NVIDIA says the PC version of Modern Warfare will deliver the most immersive and photo-realistic experience, due to the addition of ray tracing and adaptive shading.
"With the game’s October 25th release fast approaching, we can now reveal that the game is being enhanced with real-time ray-traced shadows, within both the single-player campaign and 2v2 Gunfight multiplayer mode," NVIDIA says.
Here's a look at the first ray-traced trailer for Modern Warfare...
NVIDIA has been working side-by-side with Infinity Ward's team to implement ray tracing into Modern Warfare. Being a bigger and more demanding title, RTX effects will stick to the usual script, rather than full-scene ray tracing as implemented in Minecraft and Quake II RTX.
"Our work with NVIDIA GPUs has helped us throughout the PC development of Modern Warfare," said Dave Stohl, co-studio head at Infinity Ward. "We’ve seamlessly integrated the RTX features like ray tracing and adaptive shading into our rendering pipeline. It’s been a great addition to our existing technology, and we look forward to our PC fans experiencing it for themselves very soon."
Real-time ray tracing is one of the key features of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX series. Technically, current generation (Turing) and previous generation (Pascal) cards under the GTX banner support ray tracing as well, but realistically, the dedicated hardware inside RTX cards is needed in most cases.
It's been slow going so far, though to NVIDIA's credit, it has been working with developers to bake ray-traced effects into games, particularly new ones. For example, Watch Dogs: Legion, the third installment in the Watch Dog franchise, will feature ray-traced reflections to enhance shops, skyscrapers, puddles, cars, and so forth. Here's a look at a short 44-second trailer...
Modern Warfare and Watch Dogs: Legion are far from the only games getting spiffy ray-traced visuals. There are a bunch more on tap as well. They include Control (ships August 27, 2019), Dying Light 2 (ships in the first half of 2020), Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (shipping in March 2020), and Synced: Off Planet.
That latter entry is being developed by Tencent Next Studios and is a new PvPvE and co-op action title set in the future. Here's a look...
NVIDIA also reiterated that real-time ray tracing is still coming to Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and will also be included with the The Two Colonels DLC for Metro Exodus.
"Metro Exodus’ use of global illumination made it a showcase title for ray tracing. Now, NVIDIA, 4A Games and Deep Silver are adding ray-traced global illumination with emissive lighting via the upcoming The Two Colonels DLC," NVIDIA says.
The situation regarding ray-traced support has certainly improved since NVIDIA first rolled out is GeForce RTX series, though it will probably be next year before there is a fleshed library of ray-traced titles. That day is definitely coming, though—AMD will bake ray tracing support into a future iteration of Navi, which will also be part of both Microsoft's Project Scarlett and Sony's PlayStation 5 game consoles.
In the meantime, for those who want to enable ray-traced effects, the RTX series is pretty much the only option.
