Alan Wake and Quantum Break developer Remedy is adding some cutting-edge visual features to its newest game, Control. As part of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today, Remedy revealed that it is testing RTX features for Control. RTX is Nvidia’s suite of tools for adding life-like lighting with real-time ray tracing. And it could make a pretty game like Control look even better.
RTX is a relatively new technology. It works by mimicking the way physical light behaves in the real world. But that requires a ton of processing power, and Nvidia launched new RTX video cards to specifically handle this computational workload. But for people with fast enough rigs, Control could have support for some seriously gorgeous visuals.
In the trailer, Remedy demonstrates examples of global illumination, reflections, and shadows. With global illumination, light from a projects reflects off the wall and then shines onto objects in the environment. So you get the yellowish-orange glow of a lab bouncing off of furniture. You also get accurate shadows without losing a lot of detail. You can also see accurate reflections bouncing off of extremely shiny floors.
How can you run this?
Remedy called this demo a “work-in-progress.” Nothing in the trailer is final, and it could end up pulling back on its implementation of certain features to ensure the game runs well. This is especially true for global illumination, which requires the GPU to calculate a huge number of light rays.
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But if Control ships with all of these features, you will have the option to turn them on as long as you’re using a GTX 1060 6GB or better. Nvidia revealed that it is going to unlock RTX features for GTX cards. Again, global illumination is going to crush even a 1080 Ti. But may get accurate reflections and shadows if you’re not trying to run Control at 4K or at 144 frames per second.
What about other new RTX games?
The list of RTX games is still incredibly short. Battlefield V and Metro Exodus are the highlights. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is getting some features soon. And now Remedy has added Control.
Beyond those, Nvidia only talked about two other games. One is Quake II RTX. That’s an updated version of Quake II that uses the new Vulkan graphics library. I previously covered the Quake II ray-tracing demo, and Quake II RTX builds on top of that with even better implementation.
Nvidia then talked about one other game called Dragonhound from publisher Nexon. It showed off a trailer of that game at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose.
But RTX should start showing up in even more games in the future now that it’s in Unity and Unreal game engines.
