Its been over a year since the debut of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series cards and ray tracing has now gone beyond what NVIDIA pioneered many moons ago with the debut of real-time ray tracing on PC games. Fast-forward to 2021 and while the world heal, gaming has already taken off and has grown more than 80% in 2020 and is expected to blow past that in 2021. Today, there now more gamers than ever before and they could have not picked a better time to enjoy the extremely large catalog of experiences there is out there.
On the PC gaming front, we’ve recently saw the release of a couple of titles and in this article, we’ll talk about the games releasing this quarter and what they have in store as well some of the performance features they include. So let’s get started!
Back 4 Blood
I have to admit I am quite biased to this game and for a good reason: aside from MMORPGs, there’s really not a lot of PVE multiplayers that put your gang together to just shoot stuff in agreement without worrying about the bitter aftertaste of a team loss compared to esports games. Back 4 Blood re-ignites the older Left 4 Dead itch we all had when we were young and this game perfectly frames that in a more satisfying campaign with RPG-esque card building mechanic that changes it up.
While a 4-act campaign may sound a bit short, in the 18 hours I’ve played this game, we’ve only managed to clear this game once on Recruit which is the base difficulty and I have this feeling the developer, Turtle Rock Studios, really did an amazing job keeping it woven together. While I won’t say the game is perfect, it does it well enough to justify that FPS itch until the next competitive shooter rolls around soon.
In terms of gameplay experience, we did an analysis of the DLSS performance of Back 4 Blood and we saw a 10% performance improvement even in DLSS Quality mode. In DLSS Performance mode, NVIDIA’s internal testing saw Back 4 Blood enjoy an almost 46% increase in FPS so if you got a system that can flirt with 4K, Back 4 Blood should be able to be one of those first games you can enjoy in 4K60.
Check our performance analysis of Back 4 Blood here.
But can your PC run Crysis… all 3 installments of it?
Boy, that meme just won’t die just like my man, Prophet. Crysis is back 15 years to show this generation why the name Crysis is synonymous with graphics. Join Nomad, Psycho, Prophet, and Prophet again, (ok I see you Alcatraz), as you battle the Ceph invasion, armed only with high-tech nanosuit and grit.
The game is out now featuring all 3 games from the franchise with the original Crysis, Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 but now packing this generations technology featuring fully ray-traced reflections and updated graphics. This game is so graphics intensive I think Crysis 3 as one of our game benchmarks until 2017.
This time around though you got some help running Crysis with NVIDIA’s DLSS technology also integrated in the game. As someone who has played through all 3 games before and have probably never done one two things: a) run in 60FPS or b) play in Ultra settings, with my brand new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, I may be able to do so now. I just got the game and I can’t wait to get some time with the original.
Lara Croft Gets Upgraded Again
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was one of the first games to feature the NVIDIA RTX badge featuring ray-traced shadows as well as NVIDIA DLSS in its original v1 form. Tech media love this game and a lot of people still play the game the older Rise of the Tomb Raider (wink wink Nicole Tompkins) so lo and behold, both games now have support for the latest version of DLSS so Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider can now run in either DLSS Quality or Performance mode.
Both games are also part of our benchmarking suite with Shadow of the Tomb Raider still in active duty not just in Back2Gaming’s gaming test suite but many others.
Another Classic, Remastered: Alan Wake
Alan Wake gets Remastered and also sees itself receiving the NVIDIA DLSS treatment. Now available in the Epic Games Store, the game promises to bring the classic story to modern audience with updated graphics. Not to spoil anything but if you’ve played this other RTX title, Control… they both exist in the same universe so, wink wink.
Upcoming Games with DLSS and Ray Tracing: Chivalry 2, Sword and Fairy 7
Launched in the 21st of October, Sword and Fairy is the 7th installation in the famed Chinese franchise. With a cemented following that has seen it evolve from PC monitors to stage plays, TV shows and a ton of other spin-off games and other media, Sword and Fairy 7 will arrived with fully ray-traced reflections, ray-traced shadows, ray-traced everything as well global illumination lighting. Just to make sure you get all that with only a slight performance penalty, the game also comes with NVIDIA DLSS to help punch up the framerates. Sword and Fairy 7 is available on Steam for Western audiences.
Chivalry 2 will soon get an update to receive the latest version of NVIDIA DLSS. The 64-player PVP multiplayer slasher sees players picking from various classes and then heading out for combat in this massive area where mechanical skills is just one part of the equation as strategy will help a lot as well. NVIDIA DLSS sees the game reaching up to 45% performance improvement in NVIDIA internal testing making it a treat for those that want to play the game in higher settings.
And more: F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch Now Available, features NVIDIA DLSS & Ray Tracing, Swords of Legends DLSS Update
We’ve covered this title before in a previous games update and as much as I want to play it now, I gotta go thru a ton of Back 4 Blood and Crysis but its in the pile already. Anyway, for Metroidvania sidescrolling fans out there that own an NVIDIA card, this game mixes everything you can get from RTX 30-series cards: ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS and Reflex.
Wangyuan Shengtang Entertainment Technology Company’s Swords of Legends Online will be receiving a DLSS update as well and expects to see the game receive a healthy 60% boost for even faster performance in this fantasy-action MMORPG.
Closing Thoughts
October is a prelude to the annual big title launch from Call of Duty and other similar titles but this month is just as packed with all these games releasing. Hopefully you’ve already battle through and secured yourself a graphics card and just in case you bought yourself a shiny, new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series card, you might want to check out the games we listed here to flex those RT cores and Tensor cores.
Happy gaming!
