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We know that Source 2 from Valve is a pretty capable game engine, and we've seen what they've been able to do with it over the years (and Half-Life: Alyx turned it up a notch) but what's next? Ray Tracing perhaps.

It's not a whole lot to go on but Artifact, the card-game failure from Valve that's currently going through a complete overhaul continues to be upgraded and SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik spotted something interesting that they posted up on Twitter:

What they found mentions "Raytracing Shader" and "RTX", which is pretty damn clear. The full link to all the new bits mentions plenty of other things too including Vulkan API additions.

To what end though? Where will this be going into Valve games? It doesn't really seem like a fit for Artifact, and the constant rumours of CS:GO moving over to Source 2 probably still wouldn't give it Ray Tracing either since it's a highly competitive game and it needs a level playing field. Then again, it would still be thoroughly interesting to see in action no matter what.

So what do you think this could be for? Perhaps just as a side-effect of Artifact developers pulling in newer code over all Source 2 updates, that Valve are working on overall to be available somewhere else? Half-Life: Alyx already looked pretty fantastic (from footage I've seen, no VR kit here), imagine how that would look with Ray Tracing added in.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Source Engine, Steam, Valve | Apps: Artifact
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6 comments

BielFPs Jan 15, 2021
Be sure to check out next week, when Valve will launch an early teaser of an open source multi platform CUDA alternative, in a Ricochet update!


Last edited by BielFPs on 15 January 2021 at 3:46 pm UTC
M@GOid Jan 15, 2021
I really hope they implement it without letting Nvidia put their fingers in it, otherwise it will end up like other titles sponsored by them, especially "optmised" to make AMD GPUs look bad.
Purple Library Guy Jan 15, 2021
Well if you're going to experiment with something like ray tracing, where better? The game has already flopped, so you're not on a tight schedule. You're already throwing good money after bad at this point, why not at least get some practice on new techniques out of it? And it's not a real-time thing, so it doesn't need that level playing field Liam mentioned. Precisely because RT won't matter to the game, it won't screw anything up.
1xok Jan 15, 2021
I have 1500h in this game. Failure ...
TheRiddick Jan 16, 2021
Quoting: GuestI love Artifact, the problem is that i can't play it with any friend since nobody has it.

The problem is nobody has friends whom plays Artifact! :)
dpanter Jan 16, 2021
I honestly thought it was free to play nowadays... the 18€ price tag says otherwise.
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