Nvidia has been pushing the boundaries of graphical possibilities. A few games have constantly been the flagships to demonstrate Nvidia’s prowess. Control, Take Us to the Moon and MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries have been on the front to demonstrate the technology. Back in March, Nvidia released out DLSS 2.0, an update of the first attempt at DLSS. MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries was one of the first adopters, along with Control, of the new technology. DLSS 2.0 uses deep learning technology to boost frame rates and increasing the visuals as well.
MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries has finally come out and adopted Turning ray tracing. The ray-tracing capabilities were pushed out on March 9th with an update that fixed issues with DLSS 2.0 and an install error with DirectX 12. The ray tracing is currently in beta for MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries and can be turned on or off manually. MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries ray tracing is only capable with RTX 20 series cards, despite the older GTX cards running a lower quality version of ray tracing.
The combination of DLSS 2.0 and Turning ray tracing will greatly boost the visuals of the game combining both software tricks and the raw power behind the RTX cards to render shadows more accurately by simulating like rays from explosions and other light sources.
MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries is adopting ray tracing later than Control or Deliver Us to the Moon because the game uses wide open spaces with the constant explosions and lasers are all considered individual light sources, something that is normal for the arcade shooter series. Each laser or explosion would need to simulate its own light rays, having nearby objects casting new shadows in response, with those shadows disappearing after each light source goes out. This heavily draws on the GPUs, hence ray tracing requiring an RTX 20 series GPU. The latest strongest line of GPUs in Nvidia’s line up.