Doom Eternal May Not Support Ray Tracing on Launch

Since last year, it has been known that the upcoming release of Doom Eternal was planning on offering users support for ray tracing lighting effects. It seems, however, that when it releases on March 20th that may not be the case.

In a report via DSOGaming, id Software has said that while development is being made on ray tracing, it’s not ready. More so, even this close to release, it is currently being treated as a very low priority. In other words, it seems likely that Doom Eternal is not going to support ray tracing on launch day!

Doom Eternal Will Likely See Ray Tracing Functionality Delayed

Speaking of the current development, id Software has discussed the status of ray tracing within Doom Eternal and the short version is, it doesn’t look likely to be ready for when the game hits shelves.

“So we actually haven’t talked about that at all. And we, quite frankly, haven’t spent a ton of time. The team basically did some initial implementation and exploration about a year ago. At that same time, we had so much that we wanted to do with the game still.

Our tech team is the biggest fan of new tech. Some of it was a little hard to pull everybody off of that because it was the shiny new toy but when we’re talking about getting the game out there and getting out as close on time as possible and at the highest polish quality, we kinda had to pull back that effort.

It is something that they [tech team] are like literally just about ready to start looking at it again. And they actually have some interesting ideas. I don’t want to go too far down on that path cause who knows what exactly we’ll do. However, there is more that you can use the technology for than just reflections, shadows and the real-time lighting.”

What Do We Think?

It seems pretty clear that while ray tracing is a very impressive effect, not all developers are willing to throw their entire weight behind it just yet. While we daresay that, sooner or late, Doom Eternal will support ray tracing, it seems pretty clear that nobody should expect it on launch date and probably not for a little while thereafter.

Oh well, at least they’re spending that time making the game better which is probably the slightly more important factor!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!