Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will have ray-tracing

Last week, Activision officially announced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, a return to the series that propelled the franchise into the annual blockbuster it is today. Call of Duty titles often don’t get much credit for how good they look or how well they run but there will be plenty of focus on visuals this time around, as Modern Warfare is confirmed to have ray-tracing support.

Right now, just a handful of games have implemented ray-tracing but the full list of titles with planned support spans across 15 games. So far, we’ve been able to see Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus, with Quake II and Wolfenstein Youngblood joining the ranks within the next few weeks. So far, each game has implemented it in different ways, with Battlefield focusing on reflections, Tomb Raider on shadows and Metro Exodus going for full blown global illumination.

We don’t know which route Call of Duty will take with its ray-tracing implementation. However, we do know that it will all be based on the DirectX Ray-tracing API and will work on non-RTX graphics cards. Of course, using an RTX GPU will bring big performance gains with ray-tracing switched on thanks to the dedicated RT cores.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will launch on the 25^th of October this year. Right now, we know that the PS5 aims to support ray-tracing next year and the next Xbox will likely follow suit. With that in mind, expect to hear more about ray-tracing throughout E3 next week with another major boost in 2020.

KitGuru Says: While plenty of PC gamers still have their doubts surrounding ray-tracing and its cost to overall performance, the industry is adopting it at a swift rate. I imagine we’ll be hearing about a good number of new games supporting the technology in just a matter of days.

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