Assetto Corsa Competizione May Never Support Ray Tracing despite Being Promised

[Tsing]

505 Games's sports car racing simulator Assetto Corsa Competizione was one of the 21 titles that were initially confirmed to feature ray tracing during NVIDIA's RTX graphics cards announcement in August 2018. Now, a year later, the developers have admitted they gave up on the technology (for the time being, at least) for performance reasons.

Interestingly, NVIDIA had an entire blog post written about what ray tracing would bring to Assetto Corsa Competizione, such as "real-time, realistic mirroring of surrounding detail to cars, windows, and other reflective surfaces." This is certainly fuel for critics who consider ray tracing nothing more than a marketing gimmick.

“Our priority is to improve, optimise, and evolve all aspects of ACC,” a member of the dev team writes. “If after our long list of priorities the level of optimisation of the title, and the maturity of the technology, permits a full blown implementation of RTX, we will gladly explore the possibility, but as of now there is no reason to steal development resources and time for a very low frame rate implementation.”

 

[JosiahBradley]

In it's current state it, it is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. It's not even real time if it tanks performance below 60fps (random number). It's great to have one day but it's too early there isn't the power to do it.

 

[Brian_B]

Let's see if this is the only developer, or the beginning of the end.

Given that next-gen consoles have mentioned having hardware support, I doubt Raytracing is going anywhere anytime soon... but there's been a lot of fads over the years that just kind of peter out as well.

I know I'm not very excited about it, and honestly just feel it was implemented by nVidia as a gimmick to to sell new hardware. It's just a bullet point on the side of the box right now, and right now I don't feel as if I'm missing out by not having it.

I don't suspect it will be all that useful on consoles either. I suppose time will tell.

 

[Riccochet]

Look, ray tracing is the future of gaming. It's just not the immediate future. The hardware to do it just isn't mature enough. Give it another 5-7 years. **** will be awesome then. This is a precursor to a holodeck. Imagine life size holographic ray traced environments. Yes, it needs to happen. And we will love it. But it's not today.