News ’Atomic Heart” Arrives on PC Without Ray Tracing After Years of Nvidia Promotion

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brandonjclark said:
Maybe a bit, but the game is getting great reviews. RTX doesn't make ANYTHING actually better. Well, it helps your power company a bit.
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Agreed on the game reviews/ RT not making games better...the embarrassing bit, well maybe less so for the dev but still not good AND for Nvidia its not great at all. As you implied most folks don't think RT makes anything better at this point. Having devs fail to follow through with launch RT and depending on patches later won't do Nvidia any favors with the gaming community. It only re-enforces negative views toward RT. While I do believe RT is likely the future...it is a LONG way off from becoming the default reality for PC gaming. Souring the community towards RT though, that could be a thing to kill it.
 
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I will say that the game does look and run brilliantly. At least the first 30 minute that I played around with. HDR on OLED really pops as well as is one of the better HDR presentations I’ve seen on PC. Running it with DLDSR 2.25x with DLSS Qualify and frame generation still allows for average 150-190 fps, on a 3440x1440 ultrawide, and the image quality and texture detail is absolutely superb.

That having been said…there’s very little excuse to not launch with ray tracing when it’s been advertised that way for years and they even had a downloadable RT tech demo out for it….With how many delays they’ve had so far, they should have just delayed another month and released it without the cut features. Their response to it is also silly.

Bottom line: Great looking game even without RT. But doesn’t excuse the exclusion of RT at launch.
 
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brandonjclark said:
RTX doesn't make ANYTHING actually better.
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RTX means one or both of two things:

  1. Ray tracing
  2. DLSS

So technically it's still RTX on, as noted in the article (that I contributed to). Quite a few games that Nvidia has promoted have gone the DLSS over RT route, at least initially. And I would argue that having the option for DLSS is unequivocally a win for anyone who owns an RTX card. It can boost performance a noticeable amount with minimal loss in image fidelity (using the Quality mode).
 
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Well that’s the only thing that honestly is useful from the technology, in my opinion, having played the “nice graphics” on option on some games as well.

Had nvidia gone with that marketing instead it would’ve been a winner and saved face.
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ssj3rd said:
The Game doesn't support HDR on either PC or Consoles...

So, what are you talking about?!
View: https://youtu.be/kam7BkyhqAI
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Windows 11 has an auto-HDR (borrowed from the Xbox) that has differing results based on each game. In this particular game, it looks stunning and I was so impressed by it that I actually ended up taking pictures and videos of the game running on my monitor to send to friends. It looks better than the native HDR in some other titles like Metro Exodus or Far Cry 6 for example.

Just so it's out there, I'm not unfamiliar with HDR. I used the 27" Asus PG27UQ 4K HDR1000 QD IPS for years. Also have an LG 77" OLED. And switched monitors to the Alienware QD OLED AW3423DW last year.

edit: actually if I think about it, I can’t recall seeing the auto-HDR prompt when launching the game. But I did have HDR enabled when launching the game which keeps the monitor and display output in HDR mode. I’ll see if I can figure out a way to upload an HDR recording of the monitor with my iPhone later today. I was using custom gamma/color/contrast settings so a screen recording won’t look the same as an actual video or picture of the monitor.
 
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I mean the game does have DLSS and reflex which are both Nvidia tech things. Honestly the game visually is stunning even without ray tracing being an optional toggle on.

Honestly though the one setting I'm kind of like "what?" about is the fact that they do HDD or SSD as an option for your drive speed
 
It makes me wonder about nVidia's "RTX ON/RTX OFF" advertising, as I've never seen it referring to anything but ray tracing. It's somewhat odd, as well, since DLSS and RT are entirely different, separate features.

I'll have to look up some reviews on this game, as the term "Soviet Utopia" is an oxymoron for more than one reason, imo...😉 Game does look interesting, though.
 
waltc3 said:
It makes me wonder about nVidia's "RTX ON/RTX OFF" advertising, as I've never seen it referring to anything but ray tracing. It's somewhat odd, as well, since DLSS and RT are entirely different, separate features.

I'll have to look up some reviews on this game, as the term "Soviet Utopia" is an oxymoron for more than one reason, imo...😉 Game does look interesting, though.
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Nvidia has a list of "RTX On" games and has had it since the RTX 20-series launched, where some of the games are DLSS only, some are RT only, and many are both. Take Death Stranding. It's an "RTX On" game as well because it uses DLSS. Actually, DLAA is now part of the list as well. Also interesting that Portal with RTX is the only "Full RT" game now listed — apparently Minecraft and Quake 2 "path tracing" wasn't as full as initially claimed? 🤔
 
brandonjclark said:
Maybe a bit, but the game is getting great reviews. RTX doesn't make ANYTHING actually better. Well, it helps your power company a bit.
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"Decent" reviews is probably a more accurate way to put it. With aggregate scores in the 70s, it falls short of what the top game releases are getting. Metascores are currently 72-73 on current-gen consoles, what that site classifies as only being "mixed or average", and 77 on PC, which edges into their "generally positive" category, however arbitrary those divisions might be.

And while having cutting-edge graphics might not make a great game on its own, considering this title was hyped up as something of a raytracing tech-demo to really show off what RTX could do back at the time of its announcement, not having raytracing at launch seems like a pretty significant oversight. The game might look nice as it is, but it's visuals ultimately don't quite live up to what's been advertised for years. And anyone playing the game at launch isn't getting the best visual experience out of it, so for those who care about the game looking its best, it might be better to wait for those advertised features to get patched in at a later date. Paying a premium to play an unfinished game at launch always seems a bit silly to me.

JarredWaltonGPU said:
RTX means one or both of two things:

  1. Ray tracing
  2. DLSS
So technically it's still RTX on, as noted in the article (that I contributed to). Quite a few games that Nvidia has promoted have gone the DLSS over RT route, at least initially. And I would argue that having the option for DLSS is unequivocally a win for anyone who owns an RTX card. It can boost performance a noticeable amount with minimal loss in image fidelity (using the Quality mode).
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I don't think anyone considers DLSS upscaling to count as "RTX", at least anyone who doesn't accept the nonsense that someone in Nvidia's marketing department is trying to feed them. To pretty much everyone else, "RTX" is referring stictly to Nvidia's implementation of raytracing. Even Nvidia has suggested that RTX stands for "Ray Tracing Texel eXtreme", a title that has nothing to do with upscaling on its own. Games with raytracing tend to also feature upscaling to actually enable playable performance with the feature enabled, but it's a big stretch to count games without raytracing as featuring "RTX".

John Kiser said:
Honestly though the one setting I'm kind of like "what?" about is the fact that they do HDD or SSD as an option for your drive speed
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Perhaps the SSD option may load some content in the background while playing that might otherwise get pre-loaded at a loading screen, to help reduce load times further. When set to HDD, it might spend additional time initially loading assets into memory. That's just speculation though.
 
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cryoburner said:
I don't think anyone considers DLSS upscaling to count as "RTX", at least anyone who doesn't accept the nonsense that someone in Nvidia's marketing department is trying to feed them. To pretty much everyone else, "RTX" is referring stictly to Nvidia's implementation of raytracing. Even Nvidia has suggested that RTX stands for "Ray Tracing Texel eXtreme", a title that has nothing to do with upscaling on its own. Games with raytracing tend to also feature upscaling to actually enable playable performance with the feature enabled, but it's a big stretch to count games without raytracing as featuring "RTX".
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You do realize that there is no such thing as "RTX" ray tracing? It's all done using APIs and to my knowledge, there's nothing inherently tying any game to being exclusively RT-enabled on an RTX card. (Disclaimer: Wolfenstein: Youngblood, which used Nvidia Vulkan extensions prior to the official VulkanRT availability, is sort of an exception. I'm not sure it ever allowed for using RT on anything besides Nvidia RTX cards.) You might as well try and claim that "RTX" stands for Ray Tracing Xceptionalism or something. RTX, like GTX, is a brand that has no literal meaning.

What does RTX branding mean, then? It means a graphics product that has RT cores and Tensor cores. Since DLSS is locked to Tensor cores, it absolutely means that a game with DLSS support is RTX On. This is a case of the "pretty much everyone" you speak of being wrong. It's like the people that say a game uses RTX when what they really mean is that it uses DXR or VulkanRT. RTX is not an API and never has been. In fact, an "RTX-enabled game" would more properly be considered a game that uses DLSS, which is exclusive to RTX cards, rather than DXR/VulkanRT, which are not exclusive to RTX cards. But in that case, Nvidia has messed up its own branding since it often uses RTX On to show off games with ray tracing and DLSS.

There's an interesting question: Has Nvidia ever done an RTX On / RTX Off video where it's only showing DXR On / DXR Off and not DXR + DLSS On / DXR + DLSS Off? I'd guess it probably has, but I'm not going to go searching for examples. All the recent videos I can think of have clearly had DLSS running, and now it's with DLSS 3 even. That is where I get frustrated, because showing 120 fps DLSS 3 vs. 30 fps without DLSS at all is super misleading.
 
JarredWaltonGPU said:
You do realize that there is no such thing as "RTX" ray tracing? It's all done using APIs and to my knowledge, there's nothing inherently tying any game to being exclusively RT-enabled on an RTX card. (Disclaimer: Wolfenstein: Youngblood, which used Nvidia Vulkan extensions prior to the official VulkanRT availability, is sort of an exception. I'm not sure it ever allowed for using RT on anything besides Nvidia RTX cards.) You might as well try and claim that "RTX" stands for Ray Tracing Xceptionalism or something. RTX, like GTX, is a brand that has no literal meaning.

What does RTX branding mean, then? It means a graphics product that has RT cores and Tensor cores. Since DLSS is locked to Tensor cores, it absolutely means that a game with DLSS support is RTX On. This is a case of the "pretty much everyone" you speak of being wrong. It's like the people that say a game uses RTX when what they really mean is that it uses DXR or VulkanRT. RTX is not an API and never has been. In fact, an "RTX-enabled game" would more properly be considered a game that uses DLSS, which is exclusive to RTX cards, rather than DXR/VulkanRT, which are not exclusive to RTX cards. But in that case, Nvidia has messed up its own branding since it often uses RTX On to show off games with ray tracing and DLSS.

There's an interesting question: Has Nvidia ever done an RTX On / RTX Off video where it's only showing DXR On / DXR Off and not DXR + DLSS On / DXR + DLSS Off? I'd guess it probably has, but I'm not going to go searching for examples. All the recent videos I can think of have clearly had DLSS running, and now it's with DLSS 3 even. That is where I get frustrated, because showing 120 fps DLSS 3 vs. 30 fps without DLSS at all is super misleading.
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Everybody knows RTX mean ray tracing. That's the selling point of the RTX 2060 vs the GTX 1660, one has the ability to play ray tracing effects and the other doesnt. It's not DLSS 2060 dude, it's RTX 2060
 
oofdragon said:
Everybody knows RTX mean ray tracing. That's the selling point of the RTX 2060 vs the GTX 1660, one has the ability to play ray tracing effects and the other doesnt. It's not DLSS 2060 dude, it's RTX 2060
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randyh121 said:
Where are you getting this information from?
Raytracing and DLSS are two different technologies.....
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Maybe you guys need to remind Nvidia that RTX only means raytracing. 🤡

www.nvidia.com

NVIDIA GeForce RTX

Revolution der Art und Weise, wie wir spielen und Inhalte erstellen.
www.nvidia.com
 
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JarredWaltonGPU said:
You might as well try and claim that "RTX" stands for Ray Tracing Xceptionalism or something. RTX, like GTX, is a brand that has no literal meaning.
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Of course it's a brand name, but it still doesn't change the fact that Nvidia originally used the term "RTX" to refer
specifically to raytracing. Here's their RTX press release from almost five years ago...

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/...alizes-dream-of-real-time-cinematic-rendering

NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA RTX™, a ray-tracing technology that brings real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to content creators and game developers.
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Nvidia grouping in DLSS-enabled games to count as supporting "RTX" is mostly just them trying to give the impression that there are more games featuring raytracing than there really are. I suppose there's both the RTX technology as they originally defined it, and the RTX branded cards that support features like DLSS, but their original marketing takes precedence, and is what tends to be implied when one refers to "RTX" as a feature.
 
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randyh121 said:
Where are you getting this information from?
Raytracing and DLSS are two different technologies.....
Click to expand...

cryoburner said:
Of course it's a brand name, but it still doesn't change the fact that Nvidia originally used the term "RTX" to refer
specifically to raytracing.
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They have an up-to-date page dedicated to RTX that lists DLSS as one of the features and says that their RTX architecture relies on RT Cores for ray tracing and Tensor Cores for neural "AI" stuff like DLSS:

RTX Technology
 
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