Godfall Adds DirectX 12 Ray Tracing For Radeon RX 6000, But Oddly Leaves Out GeForce RTX GPUs

The good news is that ray tracing is now available in Godfall with the 2.0.95 Update which went live today. The bad news, however, is that it is only available at the moment for AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards.

This is a rather interesting and unfortunate turn of events, given that Godfall is using Unreal Engine 4 and leverages the DirectX 12 Ultimate API. Now granted, AMD has been working very closely with developer Counterplay Games on Godfall, so we would expect some kind of deference to AMD GPUs. But considering that DirectX 12 Ultimate should technically support real time ray tracing on both Radeon RX 6000 and GeForce RTX 20/30 hardware, this exclusion is definitely a head scratcher.

Counterplay Games is only saying that, "Ray tracing using NVIDIA GPUs will come with a future update."

This also comes shortly after AMD made a big deal about using industry-backed standards for real-time ray tracing. "AMD will support all ray tracing titles using industry-based standards, including the Microsoft DXR API and the upcoming Vulkan raytracing API," said AMD in a statement earlier this month. "Games making of use of proprietary raytracing APIs and extensions will not be supported."

We'd have to imagine that this is some kind of timed exclusive to go along with today’s launch of the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT, and after this window expires, perhaps we'll see a patch for GeForce RTX cards. Or perhaps AMD simply didn’t want any direct comparisons with the GeForce RTX 30 Series at this time when it comes to ray tracing performance. In our review, which went live today, we found that ray tracing performance on the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT [at this time] lags well behind the GeForce RTX 30 Series, despite its overall strong performance in gaming and synthetic benchmarks.