AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 49pcworld.com/e319).
Several smaller titles also plan to bake in
real-time ray tracing now that all the major
game engines support it. Ray tracing is still
niche, but it’s truly revolutionary and picking
up speed with the arrival of hardware capable
of running the ultra-intensive tasks.
While the AMD-powered next-gen Xbox
Project Scarlett (go.pcworld.com/scrl) and
PlayStation 5 (go.pcworld.com/ply5) will
include ray-tracing hardware in some form,
current Radeon graphics cards do not, nor
will the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 and 5700
XT. To press its technological advantage,
Nvidia’s bundling free copies of a pair of
ray-traced games—Control and Wolfenstein:
Youngblood—with all RTX Super sales when
these cards hit the streets. Youngblood is
scheduled to launch on July 26, and Control
at the end of August.
Now, to answer the real question: Just how
super are these? Let’s head to the test bench.dual-axial fan design
introduced with the RTX
20-series, but with one
notable change: The area
between the fans is shined
to a mirror polish now,
instead of being jet black.
It’s striking, and perfect for
nerdy artistic selfies, but
you won’t see the shroud
inside a standard PC case
unless you mount your
graphics card vertically.
As mentioned before, Nvidia equipped
the Supers with more dedicated ray-tracing
hardware than before. Company
representatives pushed the ray-tracing angle
hard in briefings with the press, citing
numerous blockbuster game franchises that
have announced real-time ray-tracing support.
Metro Exodus is the current gold standard
(go.pcworld.com/mtro), with ray tracing
substantially changing the look and feel of the
game, but Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
Battlefield V, Assetto Corsa, and Quake II RTX
(go.pcworld.com/quk2) also support the
technology. Ray tracing got a huge vote of
confidence at E3 2019 as well, with Cyberpunk
2077 , Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, Doom
Eternal, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Vampire:
The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2, Remedy’s
Control, and Watch Dogs: Legion confirmed
to include the technology. Most of those
cracked our favorite games of E3 2019 (go.