Gamescom 2019: Minecraft and Dying Light 2 Add Ray Tracing. Plus Ray Tracing Trailers and Screenshots For Watch Dogs: Legion, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Control, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, and More

In the year since NVIDIA made real-time ray tracing in games a reality, the revolutionary technology has been embraced by developers across the world, from one-man indie studios up to the biggest names in the biz, like Mojang, Microsoft, Activision, Electronic Arts, and CD PROJEKT RED.

At this year’s Gamescom, we’re announcing, unveiling and demonstrating 9 new ray tracing integrations, in Minecraft, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and other big-name blockbusters. For all the details, read on.

Minecraft, one of the most popular games ever made, will add DXR ray tracing on PC, enhancing the entire game with breathtaking visuals.

Using an advanced form of ray tracing called Path Tracing, Minecraft’s worlds will be upgraded with lifelike real-time lighting, emissive blocks that illuminate their surroundings, richly detailed shadows, and so much more.

Click to open an interactive RTX ON-RTX OFF screenshot comparison

“Ray tracing sits at the center of what we think is next for Minecraft,” said Saxs Persson, Franchise Creative Director of Minecraft at Microsoft. “RTX gives the Minecraft world a brand-new feel to it. In normal Minecraft, a block of gold just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it.”

Click to open an interactive RTX ON-RTX OFF screenshot comparison

For further details, head on over to our dedicated Minecraft with RTX article, and stay tuned to GeForce.com for more details on this jaw-dropping project.

Remedy Entertainment and 505 Games’ Control launches next week with the most advanced set of ray-traced effects seen to date, enhancing image quality in every scene of the action game.

In short, there are real-time ray-traced reflections, with optional realistic transparency, ray-traced indirect diffuse lighting, and ray-traced contact shadows, further improving the fidelity of Control’s high-quality cinematic graphics. Take a quick look in a new ray-traced trailer:

Next week, we hope to bring you a Control Graphics and Performance Guide, featuring a deep dive on the game’s stunning ray-traced enhancements. Check back here to read all about it.

Click to open interactive RTX ON-RTX OFF screenshot comparisons

And don’t forget, both Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood are currently bundled with select GeForce RTX GPUs, PCs and laptops. You’ll get the hardware to enjoy the games at their best, plus the games themselves!

Dozens of games get announced at each year’s E3, but only a few walk away with awards. This year, Watch Dogs^®: Legion was one of the few, racking up nearly two dozen awards, including the official Game Critics Best Action-Adventure award.

Alongside the announcement and reveal of the game, we announced that the PC edition will benefit from a NVIDIA technical partnership, just as past titles in the franchise have. Now, we can reveal the first fruits of our labor: real-time ray-traced reflections.

These lifelike ray-traced reflections will adorn cars, windows, skyscrapers, shops, wet surfaces, and many more game elements, reflecting everything around them, further improving image quality, immersion, and realism.

Click to open an interactive RTX ON-RTX OFF screenshot comparison

For more info head on over to our dedicated article, and stay tuned to GeForce.com for future announcements about the other tech we’re bringing to Watch Dogs: Legion.

Dying Light was a hugely successful zombie-themed survival horror action role-playing game, enjoyed by 17 million players. Now, we are partnering with Techland  to bring real-time ray tracing to Dying Light 2.

Click to open an interactive RTX ON-RTX OFF screenshot comparison

“Dying Light 2 pushes the boundaries of gaming technology with our implementation of ray tracing,'' said Pawel Rohleder, Techland’s CTO. “Not only will it dramatically enhance the visuals and immersion, it will enhance the player’s experience as they explore the vast open-world.”

We’ll be sharing further details about the ray tracing tech used at a future date.

Call of Duty is one of the most critically acclaimed game franchises of all time. This year, the Call of Duty team is focusing on gritty realism for the new Call of Duty^®: Modern Warfare^®. And as with every other game mentioned on this page, we’ve partnered with Activision and Infinity Ward to help bring real-time ray tracing to Modern Warfare, ramping up the realism and immersion.

In the video below, you’ll get a first look at Modern Warfare’s ray-traced shadows. For further details, head to our dedicated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare article.

Few RPGs have commanded as much long-term interest and fandom as 2004’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, so when Paradox announced Bloodlines 2 earlier this year, a lot of gamers were very, very excited. And upping that excitement that bit further was news that the game would be enhanced with ray tracing and other NVIDIA tech.

Now, we can exclusively reveal the first ever Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 ray-traced gameplay and screenshots.

As with other uses of ray-traced reflections, anything with a suitably reflective or shiny surface will reflect the world and events occurring. 

For further Bloodlines 2 tech news, stay tuned to GeForce.com as we approach the game’s release sometime in 2020.

4A Games’ critically acclaimed Metro Exodus is expanding on August 20th with the release of a DLC side-story called The Two Colonels. The original game introduced players to beautiful graphics, enhanced with ray-traced global illumination lighting. And in this new expansion, global illumination will also be applied to area lights, point lights and emissive lights, enhancing man-made lighting and other effects, as demonstrated in the interactive screenshot comparison below.

Click to open an interactive RTX ON-RTX OFF screenshot comparison

At Gamescom, Tencent announced SYNCED: Off-Planet, a 50+ player PvPvE online action game featuring a high-fidelity post-collapse world, which will be enhanced with ray-traced reflections and shadows on GeForce RTX PCs and laptops. Check out a ray-traced trailer below, and head on over to our dedicated article to see the game’s announcement trailer, as well as some tasty ray-traced screenshots.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood and its ass-kicking fraternal twins are readying themselves for an amazing update that adds ray-traced transparent reflections. Check out the first screenshots below:

Click to open interactive RTX ON-RTX OFF screenshot comparisons

Stay tuned to GeForce.com to learn when the raytracing update will be released.

Following our $50,000 E3 giveaway, we’re giving you the chance to win even more GPUs, game merch, game codes, and laptops in our new Gamescom 2019 #RTXOn Sweepstakes. Find out how to enter by checking out the video below, and this article. Good luck!

Make sure you fire up GeForce Experience after 6am PT on August 20th to download and install a new Game Ready Driver that accelerates performance in several games and adds new community-requested features. For all the details, head here once the driver’s released.

And for the latest on other ray-traced games, G-SYNC monitors, and NVIDIA tech, bookmark GeForce.com.