Wolfenstein: Youngblood Won’t Launch With Ray-Tracing

Wolfenstein: Youngblood launches this week, but it won’t have that fancy new Ray-Tracing when it does.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is due to release on July 26, which is just a few short days from now. In an interview with GamesBeat, Jerk Gustafsson talked about the game’s Ray-Tracing, and how it won’t be ready for launch.

“We’re working together with Nvidia on that, but raytracing won’t be available at launch.”, Gustafsson said. “The engineers at Nvidia are still hard at work getting that solution to look as good as possible for the game, and the date is still to be determined. But from what we’ve seen so far, it’ll be good.”

It looks like Ray-Tracing is the next step in rendering how light behaves in games. While not a new technique, previously it was something that only occurred in non-real-time rendering due to the demanding nature of the process. A new generation of GPUs, and advancements in how Ray-Tracing functions, now see it moving into real-time rendering. It is early days for the tech when it comes to gaming, however, and at the moment only a few games currently support it.

It’s important to note, Wolfenstein: Youngblood is currently available with the purchase of Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. So getting the Ray-Tracing for it ship-shape is a top priority for the company. Development companies are also touting how next-generation consoles will have Ray-Tracing support as a feature. We are entering the age where the industry has decided that this is the “next big time.”

With the next generation consoles aiming for high frame rate, high-resolution delivery, Ray-Tracing is shaping up to be the new battleground that people will use to separate themselves from the competition. At the moment, the pace is getting set by Nvidia. Games like Wolfenstein: Youngblood are going a long way to letting us all know just how viable Ray-Tracing is right now. They also set how much of a difference it makes for our gaming experience.