Battlefield 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider to deliver Nvidia’s real-time ray tracing this year

Launching in September this year, Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be one of the first games to feature real-time raytracing, powered by Nvidia’s new Turing-powered GeForce GPUs. Nvidia’s RTX tech is also being poured into DICE/EA’s Battlefield 5 for its October launch too. Using the combination of Nvidia’s RTX and Microsoft’s DXR API. Nvidia showed off a demo at its pre-Gamescom GeForce Gaming Celebration this evening with its Turing GPU powering the real-time ray traced shadows in Lara’s latest adventure and the WWII bullet-fest that is BF5. And it all looks rather stunning in the demos shown on stage, though maybe less so in the post-show capture session pushing the new RTX 2080 Ti to its limits. The frame rates we saw show that even the top-end hardware might struggle at the highest settings. But the difference in the quality of the shadows in the, now suddenly aptly titled, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is immense. The hard edges of the traditionally rendered shadows are immediately smoothed out with the ray tracing RTX tech enabled, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.