In 15 hours of Atomic Heart, I had one snag as I loaded into a new area, no crashes, and no steep frame rate drops. Even Returnal , which I would consider one of the more stable PC releases I’ve seen in the past few years, would occasionally hang for a couple seconds and straight-up crashed on me four times during testing. I’ve grown accustomed to any new PC release showing some amount of hitching, but I’ve had zero problems with Atomic Heart. The most shocking part of Atomic Heart is that it doesn’t stutter on PC.

I think it was the right decision given how well the game runs and looks without ray tracing, but it’s still a bait-and-switch situation. There’s an elephant in the room here - Atomic Heart promised ray tracing for years through Nvidia showcases and pulled the plug just hours before the game went on sale. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2 is available in the game, so you can boost your performance regardless of if you have an RTX GPU or not. It’s not nearly as fast as Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales, so artifacts are few and far between, and they’re tough to spot.

Frame Generation works well in a game like Atomic Heart, too.

Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is available, including Frame Generation for RTX 40-series GPUs. It would, as ray tracing normally does, add additional depth to lighting and shadows, but the traditional rasterized techniques employed by the game already look fantastic and save a lot in the performance department.Īlthough Atomic Heart ditched ray tracing, it didn’t ditch RTX altogether. I’m sure Nvidia would like another showcase of ray tracing to sit alongside Cyberpunk 2077 and Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, but Atomic Heart doesn’t need ray tracing.

It’s no secret that ray tracing tanks your performance, and with games like Portal RTXintroducing features like RTX Direct Illumination, it can make even high-end systems look downright puny. That might surprise you considering Atomic Heart doesn’t support ray tracing on PC (or consoles, for that matter) at launch.ĭeveloper Mundfish says ray tracing is coming after launch in a patch, but Atomic Heart is better off without it. Atomic Heart: Official GeForce RTX Real-Time Ray Tracing DemoĪtomic Heart has been the centerpiece of Nvidia’s ray tracing showcases since the first RTX generation was introduced in 2018.

Atomic heart rtx 1070ti