Atomic Heart has launched without ray tracing despite featuring in multiple Nvidia tech demos
Whatever your take on it, there's no denying Atomic Heart is a very pretty game(opens in new tab). So pretty, in fact, that it's been the subject of several Nvidia showcases demonstrating the latest and greatest in the GPU-maker's graphics tech, including an «RTX On» demo(opens in new tab) as recently as a month ago. But now Atomic Heart is finally here, and it seems RTX is not, in fact, on.
As spotted by RPS(opens in new tab), it seems that Atomic Heart developer Mundfish has yanked out ray tracing support from the game in the last stretch of its development. That's a bit of a surprise, given all the aforementioned Nvidia demos and that Mundfish doesn't seem to have ever announced that Atomic Heart's rays wouldn't be traced in the run-up to its release. But no matter how deep you go into the graphics options, you won't be able to turn on ray tracing mode in the game's current build.
Mundfish seems to be suggesting this is a temporary situation. When PC Gamer reached out to the studio, it told us that «Ray tracing won’t be available at release,» but that it would «revisit the needs of [its] gamers» in the post-launch period. Mundfish also told RPS that it would be «looking into implementing [ray tracing] post-launch».
That'd all be fine and dandy—it's not as though Atomic Heart is an eyesore with bog-standard rasterized lighting—but it is a bit curious that the feature's absence wasn't publicised in advance of the game's release. After all, Mundfish did let everyone know that the console versions of the game don't support the feature(opens in new tab). Atomic Heart has been marketed with a heavy focus on its lovingly-rendered Soviet aesthetics, with a particular focus on how well it plays with Nvidia tech like DLSS and,
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