Ghostrunner will feature Raytraced Reflections, Shadows and Ambient Occlusion

It is hard to deny that raytracing represents the future of gaming graphics. Today, the point of contention isn’t whether or not it is the future, but whether or not today’s hardware is up to the task. More accurately, it is if Nvidia’s RTX hardware is up for the job.

In the eyes of many PC gamers, ray tracing is a task for next-generation graphics hardware, if not the generation thereafter. Even so, it is worth noting that games like Metro Exodus and Control were already graphically demanding without the addition of raytracing. This factor that only serves to make each game’s RTX performance all the more disappointing. As powerful as Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti is, it isn’t even close to powerful enough for native 4K 60FPS performance in these games with RTX enabled.

But what if we applied raytracing to smaller games? Lower budget titles which will use raytracing to deliver graphical upgrades that stand beyond what would otherwise be possible. Enter Ghostrunner, a cyberpunk slicer which places gamers in the feet of a ninja; one who must slice through opponents and take part in some crazy parkour to reveal the secrets of the game’s dystopian world.

One More Level, the developer of the game, plans to integrate DXR raytracing into Ghostrunner through Unreal Engine 4. Through this effort, the game will gain support for raytraced soft shadows, raytraced reflections and raytraced ambient occlusion. Through this, One More Level plans to enhance Ghostrunner’s visuals significantly, pushing past what would otherwise be possible for the developer.

Ghostrunner’s development team is made up of 25 people, with Epic Games’ work on Unreal Engine 4 making it relatively easy to implement DXR/RTX support. An interview with one of Ghostrunner’s developers is available below, courtesy of Nvidia.

Ghostrunner targets a 2020 release on PC via Valve’s Steam platform.