The big talking point on the Web now is the performance hit that comes with raytracing, even on the high-end GeForce RTX 2080Ti card. Can you reveal how MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is currently handling the RTX features in terms of resolution and frame rate? Do you expect significantly improved performance after the final optimization pass?
This may go without saying, but it’s worth stressing that we can only speak to our specific case when it comes to performance. I expect every team, every title is likely to be a little different, even between titles that are using the same engine. Optimization is a long process, and at least at this early stage, we weren’t focusing our resources toward it a great deal. By the end of our work in this phase, we were operating at 60fps with raytraced shadows and ambient occlusion at 1080p and maxed out quality settings, down to around 30 when we activated raytraced reflections together with those two features. The reflections aren’t cheap, no doubt about that, but with additional optimization on our end and continued work from NVIDIA, I expect all of the raytraced features to be a perfectly performant option in our case.