We not too long ago interviewed Neon Big’s Co-founder and Artistic Director Tor Frick to speak about the principle tech options of The Ascent, resembling ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS, each out there on the PC model through Steam.
Frick informed us:
The Ascent is a little bit of a particular case, one would suppose the digital camera angle would make it simpler to implement raytracing, however as a consequence of how a lot of the world we’ve loaded at any given time, we really wanted fairly a couple of bespoke implementations for the raytracing, particularly for the culling of geometry, since we do have quite a lot of that. It took a little bit of backwards and forwards to search out the precise strategies for this.
Visually, we additionally tweaked the reflections each for efficiency, but in addition with an added layer of visible management to have the ability to improve the impact. Issues just like the energy and roughness of the reflections, to ensure that the impact was introduced out to its most. We’ve got quite a lot of transferring objects and animated shaders on the planet, and we needed to utilize that as a lot as potential. So when taking part in with raytraced reflections enabled you’ll really see mirrored animated billboards which are solely seen with ray tracing, as they’re exterior the playable house. Simply to carry that extra layer of life into the world.
For DLSS, we’re at present on 2.1, however seeking to improve to 2.2 both for launch or very shortly thereafter. The implementation went very easily, with some assist from our buddies at Nvidia.
Nevertheless, it looks as if neither ray tracing nor NVIDIA DLSS can be found in case you’re taking part in The Ascent by way of your Recreation Go subscription on PC. To be extra exact, NVIDIA DLSS is totally lacking, whereas ray tracing will be enabled however does not make any visible or efficiency distinction.
Some Reddit customers really tried to inject NVIDIA DLSS recordsdata into the sport, however the packaged nature of Recreation Go video games makes it almost unattainable to tinker as you’ll with any common PC recreation (which can be why modding on Recreation Go remains to be lagging behind). Let’s hope the builders of The Ascent repair the damaged ray tracing and add NVIDIA DLSS to this model of the sport, however extra importantly, Microsoft wants to enhance each the accessibility to Recreation Go recordsdata, in order that PC players might freely tweak the recordsdata as they might with a daily Steam title, and the be certain that the function set stays the identical throughout all PC variations.
In any other case, nearly as good as a deal Recreation Go at present is, it may not be sufficient for the hardcore PC gamer with lacking options like these.
