Red Dead Redemption 2 will not have ray tracing according to Nvidia, despite rumours whizzing around the web over the past 24 hours suggesting it might. It all stems from screenshots of Rockstar’s western posted by Nvidia itself, adorned with “Nvidia GeForce RTX” logos posted in the bottom left. However, the company has since clarified that these are intended only to advertise its RTX 20-series GPUs – and are not a hint at surprise real-time ray tracing support.
The logos on the screenshots are not all that dissimilar to the “RTX on” labels Nvidia usually sticks on ray-traced titles, which has led to some confusion among Twitter users. Sadly, while we’d love to see Rockstar implement some gorgeous lighting, shadows, and reflections in its highly-anticipated PC port of RDR2, this all stems from the shared RTX branding on Nvidia’s part.
Nvidia has since followed up the initial tweet posted to the Nvidia GeForce Twitter account with the following clarification. “Just a heads up to avoid confusion – the GeForce RTX logo here references our GeForce RTX 20 series products. Red Dead Redemption 2 does not have ray tracing.”
The Red Dead Redemption 2 release date is next Tuesday – November 5, 2019.
Just arrived! New Red Dead Redemption 2 PC screenshots in glorious 4K.
Make sure you're Game Ready with the GeForce RTX 20 Series. pic.twitter.com/aXdaIVVBUa
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) October 30, 2019
Recent RTX releases include Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Control. And we know Minecraft RTX and Cyberpunk 2077 are two of the upcoming ray-traced titles on the way next year.
But for now, Read Dead Redemption 2 remains solely rasterised. Even so, the game “looks and feels its best on PC” according to Will Freeman in our Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay impressions piece. And with the PC port launching in a few days, perhaps we’ll see some community mods take the in-game graphics to the next level with the backing of the best graphics cards on the PC platform.
Can you run it? Check the Red Dead Redemption 2 specs at PCGameBenchmark.