Red Dead Redemption 2 launches for PC this week. Will it feature Nvidia’s real-time ray tracing?
Red Dead Redemption 2 is already one of the prettiest video games ever made. And thus far, we’ve only seen it on consoles. The Xbox One X and PS4 Pro versions are impressive, but what everyone’s really looking forward to is throwing a beastly graphics card – like an RTX Titan or RTX 2080 Ti – at the game and seeing just how good it gets.
A few days ago, graphics card manufacturer Nvidia tweeted some 4K screenshots of Red Dead Redemption 2 running on its RTX 20 series GPU hardware. Twitter image compression aside, it is stunning.
Just arrived! New Red Dead Redemption 2 PC screenshots in glorious 4K.
Make sure you're Game Ready with the GeForce RTX 20 Series. pic.twitter.com/aXdaIVVBUa
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) October 30, 2019
But between the “god rays” – the light streaks coming through the fog and trees – and the “Nvidia Geforce RTX” logo in the bottom-right corner of those images, some people jumped to the conclusion that Red Dead Redemption 2 will feature Nvidia’s RTX real-time ray tracing. Sadly, it will not.
In a follow-up Tweet, Nvidia confirmed that the logo refers to the Geforce RTX series of hardware that the screenshots were captured on, not the RTX real-time ray tracing feature available on those cards. (Are the cards named after the feature? Is the feature named after the cards? We’re not sure. It’s possibly a chicken-or-egg situation.)
Just a heads up to avoid confusion – the GeForce RTX logo here references our GeForce RTX 20 series products. Red Dead Redemption 2 does not have ray tracing.
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) October 31, 2019
That doesn’t mean Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t still going to be glorious on PC. It will still be stunning.
But for those of you with expensive RTX hardware, who were hoping to take advance of those dedicated real-time ray tracing to make the lighting even more special? It’s probably not the news you were hoping for.
Thinking of picking up Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC? Check out the system requirements.
