With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Black Myth: Wukong, and Star Wars Outlaws, ray tracing in games is slowly becoming an Nvidia-exclusive

At this year's Gamescom event, two forthcoming games heavily feature ray tracing as the means for producing the best possible graphics. Star Wars Outlaws and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle both have graphics features, either exclusively developed by Nvidia or are so demanding that only high-end GeForce RTX cards can really handle it.

Nvidia was the first GPU vendor to bring real-time ray tracing hardware to the gaming masses at another Gamescom in 2018, with its GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards. But since then, AMD and Intel have both followed suit, and all new gaming PCs and consoles are more or less capable of ray tracing. Most PC gamers are well aware that Nvidia's GPUs can do ray tracing faster than the competition but three games show that Nvidia is doing its best to push the technology to new heights—and very much in its favour.

Take the recently launched Black Myth: Wukong. Its graphics are spectacular but to get the very best visuals, you need to enable a setting called Full Ray Tracing. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and it uses Lumen ray-traced global illumination by default. However, 'full ray tracing' is a path tracing algorithm.

If you're a hardware enthusiast, you'll already know about path tracing but even if you don't, you may well have already come across it in Cyberpunk 2077 or more recently, a mod for Doom 2. Path tracing is actually a whole bunch of different algorithms but the general idea is that it's a means to let developers push the amount of ray tracing taking place, without utterly tanking the performance. It's still very demanding but the results are super impressive.

At Gamescom 2024, it was announced that the forthcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game will also have path tracing—sorry, Full Ray Tracing. Now, there's no indication whatsoever that the option will only work on GeForce RTX cards but given how demanding it is, you can be pretty sure that just the likes of the RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4090 will be able to run