Atomic Heart Ditches Ray Tracing on PC at the Very Last Minute

wccftech.com:

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