If you remember back to the countless videos showcasing Atomic Heart and its incredible ray tracing, you might be wondering what happened to it between then and now. Developer Mundfish did confirm that at launch, consoles would not support ray tracing. However, it seems that the PC platform was tossed into that “not support ray tracing” category too. As it stands, the PC version has zero ray tracing support.
This is quite concerning considering how much marketing was done for Atomic Heart around its RTX features. NVIDIA itself even uploaded gameplay videos where the company showcased ray tracing in the game.
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Back in 2018 during Gamescom, Atomic Heart was deemed the poster child for ray tracing. The game would support ray tracing shadows, reflections and even ambient occlusion. At CES 2019, the game was once again part of NVIDIA’s media briefing where the company showed off the ray tracing advances it had made.
Fast forward to February 2023 and Atomic Heart launched this week with no ray tracing support at all. At the moment, it isn’t clear why this happened. The studio has openly discussed how “incredible” its game looked and how its ray tracing performance was “running smoothly”. However, if you pick up the game on PC, or grab it through Game Pass instead, don’t expect it to take advantage of all those RT cores in your GPU.
Funny enough, the review guide which was sent to media who were covering the game, does mention a ray tracing setting in the game. There is an “RT Ultra” option which media were made aware of. But according to reports, this option doesn’t exist at all. I reviewed the game on PS5 (read my review here) so didn’t even look for an RT option after Mundfish confirmed no ray tracing and no optional graphics modes on consoles.
Mundfish hasn’t released any sort of feedback regarding the ray tracing support in Atomic Heart. What should have been there at launch, simply isn’t. By the look of things, the Atomic Heart ray tracing support was pulled at the last minute. Maybe due to performance issues? Who knows at this point?
