Remember RTX? It's in a video game now

If you’ve purchased an Nvidia RTX graphics card, you can finally enjoy your fancy new GPU’s namesake feature. All you have to do is update a handful of programs and join Electronic Arts’ premium subscription service.

Battlefield V is officially the first game to support real-time ray tracing. This feature enables light to reflect off surfaces like windows and puddles in a hyperrealistic way. The game can use this feature if you meet a number of requirements. Most important, you need to run either an Nvidia RTX 2070, 2080, or 2080 Ti. And as you might expect, the bigger the number of your GPU, the faster it’ll handle this computationally expensive feature.

Remember to keep your software up-to-date

In addition to the video card, you will also need a subscription to Origin Access to download the game, the Nvidia GeForce 416.94 drivers, and the latest Windows update. That is the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which Microsoft actually pulled due to bugs last month. It’s back, and it still supports the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) graphics API necessary to enable RTX.

If you have all of the updates and the appropriate hardware, you should see “DXR Enabled” in Battlefield V’s video settings. Or that’s my understanding, I haven’t been able to try this yet. I have Windows 10 updating on my machine right now, and it looks suspiciously like it’s locked on the “do not reset your PC” screen.

So is RTX worth it?

I’m going to dive into RTX soon. I’m looking forward to determining if it lives up to Nvidia’s hype. Right now, I don’t know. My guess is that in certain circumstances, it’s going to appear quit beautiful. But I also think that most people may want to turn it off if the jump in fidelity comes with a significant hit to performance.

But again, I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I’m excited to see what Battlefield V looks like. It’s already a stunning game, and maybe RTX could put it over the top.

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