The Soviets knew many forms of tracing, but as the Atomic Heart example shows, ray tracing is not one of them.

It would be a shame to deny that Atomic Heart is a beautiful game. So beautiful, in fact, that Nvidia has held several demonstrations showcasing the GPU manufacturer’s latest and greatest graphics technology. Among them was an “RTX On” demo (see end of article) just a month ago. Now, however, Atomic Heart is finally here, but it seems that RTX isn’t actually on.

As spotted by RPS, it appears that Atomic Heart developer Mundfish pulled ray tracing support from the game in the final stages of development.

This is a bit surprising, given the Nvidia demos mentioned above. Moreover, Mundfish did not indicate before release that Atomic Heart would not have this feature. But no matter how deep you go into the graphics settings, you can’t turn on ray tracing mode in the current build of the game.

This seems to be a temporary situation. The studio has now said that ray tracing will not be available at launch but that they will “review [the] needs of players” post-launch. Mundfish also told RPS that they are “looking into the post-launch implementation of [ray tracing]”.

That would be all well and good – not that Atomic Heart is eye-poking with its swamp-standard rasterised lighting – but it’s a little odd that the lack of the feature wasn’t disclosed before the game’s release.

After all, Mundfish let everyone know that the game’s console versions would not support the feature. Just why, then, was the PC version advertised as playing so well with Nvidia’s technology like DLSS and, well, ray tracing?!

And judging by the game’s subreddit, it really seems that gamers were outraged by this move. It’s not the lack of technology per se that’s annoying. After all, as written, the game is still beautiful. But such a blatantly dishonest marketing ploy to mislead players could rightly provoke similar reactions…

Source: RPS, Wccftech