Ray tracing — the high-quality lighting effect taking gaming by storm — has arrived on one of the biggest franchises.
Starting on Thursday, players of Fortnite on the PC can turn on ray tracing and experience the title with far more fidelity.
The feature, which is only available on PCs running Nvidia GPU cards and DirectX 12, allows for dramatically improved visual and lighting effects, creating a more realistic in-game experience, developer Epic Games announced in a blog post.
Epic Games showed a before-and-after shot detailing how big of a difference ray tracing makes.
In the first, with ray tracing on, there’s far more detail on cars and you can see the reflections of other players on windows. In the other, with ray tracing turned off, the same scene looks rather dull in comparison.
Ray tracing is a newer technology developers are increasingly adding support for in games. In addition to PCs, the technology will be available on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, both of which launch this November. Ray tracing is a rendering technique that mimics real-life light and how it affects how we see the world. Ray tracing should make games far more realistic, developers say.
In addition to ray tracing, the Fortnite update also includes support for Nvidia’s DLSS, which allows for ray tracing to work at higher frame rates. Another feature, called Nvidia Reflex, reduces Fortnite‘s latency and renders the ray tracing effects in real time.
First, you’ll need to have PCs that work with DirectX 12 and have four or more cores in their CPUs. An Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or higher is also required. However, Epic says the game will look best on CPUs with eight or more cores and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 or higher.
To turn on the feature, follow these steps:
Once those steps are completed, the game will automatically turn ray tracing on and players will be all set.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.