Hardware accelerated ray tracing, variable rate shading, advanced image reconstruction techniques driven by machine learning: these are all cutting edge rendering technologies likely to be a seriously big deal once the next generation console era is upon us. However, PC owners today have the ability to preview all of these technologies running in tandem in one of the most impressive and performant game engines around. Yes, Wolfenstein Youngblood has been patched to support the gamut of Nvidia RTX features and the results are highly impressive.
So what do users of RTX cards get with this new update to the latest and possibly last id Tech 6 title? Taking centre stage is ray tracing support, where the developers target one of the most challenging and expensive RT techniques: reflections. Much like Control or Battlefield 5, ray tracing replaces the game's use of cube maps and screen-space reflections on nearly every surface. In addition to increased realism, you also get the ability to 'see' reflections of the in-game world that don't exist in screen-space - like the player characters themselves, for example. However, the implementation is much wider ranging than you might imagine.
The embedded video on this page illustrates a couple of key aspects. First of all, you get to see how standard cube maps and screen-space reflections actually work - and then you get to see the more accurate ray traced alternative. It's quite fascinating how as players we've become accustomed to what are fundamentally compromised results. Game makers have got really good at 'faking' these effects and I also suspect that as virtually every major engine uses similar techniques, we've grown accustomed to their lack of realism. So when you sit down and study how those reflections should actually look, the results are eye-opening.Youngblood's effect is realistic right down to the most incidental details in the tiniest reflections.