No Ray Tracing At Launch? Bless Your Atomic Heart

This Week In Games That Look Better In The Trailer …

The screenshots of Atomic Heart are certainly pretty, but are missing something which would improve the look on NVIDIA machines and which was a major focus during the lead up to launch, ray tracing.   Mundfish, the developers do promise it will arrive soon.  The demo, released four years ago, featured ray tracing so we do know the game will support it, however at launch you won’t find it in the graphics options.   In the mean time we can hope they are finding ways to let AMD users at least stick their toes into tracing some rays.

The requirements to play the game are not as steep as you might assume.  Just about any computer with a discrete GPU can play at 1080p on low settings and get a decent frame rate.  If you want high settings at that resolution you still won’t need anything current generation, a GTX 1080 or RX 5700 paired with a Core i5-7600K or Ryzen 5 1600 will do you.  To move up to Ultra you need slightly newer kit, an RTX 2070 Super or RX 6700 XT CPU and a Core i7-7700K or Ryzen 5 2600X.   Those wanting to try 4K are going to be impressed to learn a RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT will do you as long as you have a Coffee Lake or Matisse generation CPU.   The game also supports FSR and DLSS 3 if you want to play at a higher resolution than your old hardware should be able to handle.

The game itself will take you a bit to get into, it starts with an introduction which can last anywhere from 10-45 minutes depending on how deep you want to dive into playing.  It’s just you and your AI-powered glove, plus whatever you can scrounge from the environment against crazed robots and plant zombie type things.  The glove gains powers, including a handy vacuum mode to make scrounging easier as well as combat effective tricks.  You can check out more, without any real spoilers, over at Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN if you are so inclined.