HomeHardwareNewsWolfenstein: Youngblood
Six months after launch, ray tracing finally comes to Wolfenstein: YoungbloodBetter late than never, I guess
Better late than never, I guess
Wolfenstein: Youngbloodwas one of Nvidia’s bigray tracing gamesof last year, and it was even one of the free games you could get if you bought a new RTX graphics card over the summer. However, whereas its other freebie stablemate Control teleported its ray tracing support in at launch, Wolfenstein: Youngblood positively dragged its cybernetic heels over it, with months and months passing after its initial July release date without any word on when it might finally pitch up. Finally, the reflection gods at Nvidia have spoken, and it’s going to be patched in as part of their latest CES GeForce driver update available this week. Hoo-rah.
The update comes rather late in the day for anyone to possibly care about, perhaps, but at least it’s better than not pitching up at all. Nvidia have also elaborated on exactly what kind of ray tracing you can expect from Wolfenstein: Youngblood’s update, namely a heck of a lot of reflections. You’ve got your weapons effects reflections, dynamic real-time reflections being reflected on enemies and reflections on other “moving game elements,” they said in theirblog post.
There’s only a single On or Off setting in Wolfenstein: Youngblood’s menu settings, sadly, so you won’t be able to tailor your ray tracing experience in the same way asControl’s RTX featuresunfortunately, but the good news is that the update will also add DLSS support in at the same time. This should help to give your GPU a small performance boost if you find your PC’s struggling to cope with it all.
Hopefully, though, RTX owners shouldn’t have too much trouble with it, provided you keep DLSS switched on. Indeed, Nvidia go on to say that their entry-levelRTX 2060card should be capable of hitting 60fps and above on max settings at 1920x1080 with DLSS enabled, while theRTX 2070should be enough for 60fps+ on max at 2560x1440, albeit again with DLSS switched on. For 60fps at 4K, meanwhile, you’ll likely need anRTX 2080, according to Nvidia.
If you can’t wait that long, though, why not cast your eye over Nvidia’s DLSS comparison trailer below. From the looks of things, DLSS looks pretty much identical to having it switched off if you ask me, and I don’t think it’s something you’re really going to notice in motion when you’re bombing around shotgunning Nazis in the face, so you might as well leave it switched on and punch up those frame rates a bit.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Elsewhere in Nvidia’s CES driver update,Quake II RTXis also getting a photo mode for custom screenshots as part of its v1.3 update, and you’ll find a bunch of new settings that let you set your own maximum frame rate, enable GPU scaling, turn on a special power saving mode and reduce system latency in Nvidia’s Control Panel.
Only 20 games meet Nvidia’s VRSS requirements at the moment, but there are plenty of big names in there includingJob Simulator,Killing Floor: Incursion, LA Noire: The VR Case Files,Lone Echo,Raw Data, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, Robo Recall, Space Pirate Trainer and Talos Principle VR to name just a few. For a full list and more info on how VRSS works, head over toNvidia’s website.
For more news from this year’s CES, check out ourCES 2020tag.
