Surgical Scalpels, the team behind upcoming space-bound FPS, Boundary, has released a new raytracing benchmark to help test the abilities of your existing Turing graphics card, and next-generation Ampere GPUs too. It incorporates not just shadows and reflections, but global illumination, leveraging the full power of new-gen ray tracing acceleration to render some outstandingly pretty lighting effects that could make the upcoming game an intriguing experience in its own right.
Ray tracing is a costly business, whether you have an entry-level RTX 2000-series card, or plan to buy one of Nvidia's upcoming RTX 3090 monster GPUs with all of its second-generation RT-core goodness. But it's becoming more viable and with better hardware acceleration and mediation tools like DLSS that can help ease the load on the GPU core, it looks stupendous, without being quite so demanding.
Boundary is one of the next-generation of games that will support full scale ray tracing throughout the game and it promises to not only look fantastic, but offer some interesting ways to approach the game. You'll be able to better use shadow and reflection tracking to find your opponents, and be more wary of the own light you've bouncing around the inky blackness of space to stay away from enemy fire.
The benchmark is set to be available for anyone to download on September 24, with Boundary itself debuting sometime before the end of the year.
