Unreal Engine Preview Release RTX Features Seem Popular

Unreal Engine

Earlier this week, we reported how a preview build for the highly-popular game developer tool ‘Unreal Engine’ had been released. While updates to this software program are not unusual, the latest carried something a little special. Specifically, it was the first release to include full support for the creation of games with ray tracing effects.

While there was more than a little question as to how well this would be applied, Reddit users are taking to the social media platform with a general consensus pointing towards the features within the design software being really good.

Popular With Users

User, Antidamage, has posted a lengthy overview of their experiences with the preview build so far. On the whole, he is rather impressed with the release saying that it provides surprisingly good access to create games using the real-time light rendering offered in the Nvidia 20XX range of graphics cards.

Positive Points

Some of his key points (all direct quotes) include;

• It’s fast. I haven’t really pushed it, but 110-120fps seems to be easily achievable.
• A whole lot of shadow settings don’t matter anymore.
• Everything just looks great.
• Fully dynamic scenes seem to just work well. There’s probably a use case for them, but right off the bat, it’s a waste of time to build your lighting during development.
• Straight up by default things look like they were carefully hand-lit by an artist.
• Most Unreal Engine games are going to be able to just switch it on. No need to go back to the drawing board or needing to redo your assets.

We should, in addition, note that all of the screenshots within this article are direct examples of his (Antidamage’s) work.

What Do We Think?

Although we haven’t tried this out ourselves, it is good to see the community being supportive of this update. At the time of writing, there certainly are not many games that really get the best potential out of the RTX graphics cards features. As such, if indie-developers can get involved, we’ll likely see a huge upturn in compatible content in the very near future.

Additionally, since Unreal Engine is so popular with professional developers and companies, this update may allow them to make the RTX features compatible with many of their upcoming projects.

I suppose at this point, all that’s left if for Nvidia to price the graphics card range at a price we can all (just about) afford.

What do you think? Have you tried the preview build? If so, what are your thoughts on the ray tracing features? – Let us know in the comments!