Nvidia has just announced the Diablo 4 ray tracing release date, which will bring you shiny armor and realistic water reflections, among other benefits, as long as your GPU has enough power to cope with the workload. Not only that, but the ray tracing update will come just in time for the game’s forthcoming availability on Microsoft’s Game Pass service, meaning you should be able to get straight into some ray traced demonic dungeon crawling if you’re a subscriber.
This latest update has been in the works for a long time, coming a good nine months after the release of Diablo 4 in 2023. In case it needs saying, we love Diablo 4, and gave the game a score of 10/10 in our Diablo 4 review, so we’re really looking forward to playing it with even better visuals on the best graphics cards that support ray tracing.
According to Nvidia, the Diablo 4 ray tracing release date is Tuesday, March 26, 2024, two days ahead of the Diablo 4 Game Pass release date. According to Nvidia, there are two ray-traced effects being added to the game with this update – reflections and shadows.
“Armor, water, windows, and other suitably reflective surfaces will now feature accurate, realistic ray-traced reflections and ray-traced transparent reflections,” says the GPU maker, while shadows “will be enhanced with ray tracing, adding extra detail to all scenes.”
You can see Diablo 4 ray tracing for yourself in the video above. This piecemeal approach to adding ray tracing effects, rather than going for an all out path tracing mode, should mean that Diablo 4 with ray tracing isn’t too demanding.
We’ll have to wait before we can test the game in our own benchmarks, but we’re hoping that it will run fine on a last gen GPU, such as the RTX 3070, while the latest GPUs, such as the RTX 4070 Super, should have no trouble running it at all. The latter will also get a helping hand from Nvidia’s DLSS 3 frame generation tech, which is already supported by the game.
Diablo 4 isn’t the only ray-traced RPG that’s getting us excited this year either, with Dragon’s Dogma 2 bringing DLSS and ray tracing to the party in March 2024 as well. Make sure you check out the Diablo 4 system requirements and Dragon’s Dogma 2 system requirements, to see if your hardware is powerful enough to run either game.