How to enable ray tracing in The Ascent

Ray tracing has never been easier. At last you can play your favorite games in real-time ray tracing glory!

The Ascent is a super detailed first-person shooter in VR that’s produced by a team of game developers called From Dust. It’s being developed for all major VR headsets and you may have already played it on the Steam Early Access version. As if that’s not enough, the team recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the game’s full release.

Ray tracing is the process of tracing the path of light in a computer graphics rendering, which makes objects in the render appear to be more detailed and realistic. The Ascent is an upcoming first-person shooter by Ubisoft, which will utilize ray tracing as a visual effect. Ray tracing is a more expensive process than traditional graphics rendering, but it can produce much more realistic lighting in the scene. In this blog, I will show you how to enable ray tracing in The Ascent to add realistic lighting to your game.

The proliferation of ray tracing, a technique for rendering light sources and reflections that has appeared in blockbuster titles like Watch Dogs: Legion, has been the hottest development in gaming visuals, and now ray tracing is available as one of the big ticket features for The Ascent, a cyberpunk action RPG from Neon Giant Games. Many gamers have been eager to test their settings with The Ascent’s rich landscapes and sophisticated lighting since its debut, but some have had trouble enabling the game’s blockbuster ray tracing feature. Here’s how to make sure your setup is suitable for ray tracing.

In The Ascent, where can I locate ray tracing settings?

Here’s how to locate the necessary options if you already have a ray tracing setup and only need to turn it on in game. Open the options menu (either from the game’s main menu on launch or by pausing) and scroll all the way down to visuals to access the in-game ray tracing parameters. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the graphics menu to the “RAY TRACING” options.

You can see that all three ray tracing options (Shadows; Reflections; Ambient Occlusion) are greyed out and set to “on” in the screenshot above. For a number of reasons, this is a little deceptive. The first is that the hardware we used to test it (an Acer gaming laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060) does not support ray tracing. The second reason this is deceptive is because it is not feasible to modify the files required to activate or disable ray tracing on Xbox Gamepass. Because the game’s rendering engine always performs something like to ray tracing, these settings are set to “on” by default. However, only a tiny percentage of computers are really ray tracing capable. Continue reading for additional information on those two topics.

Is ray tracing supported by Xbox Gamepass for PC?

Unfortunately, the answer is (usually) no, although there is one exception. To enable “real” ray tracing in The Ascent, you’d have to “inject” Nvidia DLSS files into the game’s directory, but there’s no proof that this method works. Currently, The Ascent does not support NVidia DLSS or other types of “true” ray tracing, and Xbox Gamepass users are unable to alter the game’s files in such a manner that they may inject the files required to enable ray tracing.

Because The Ascent was aesthetically designed around ray tracing, any suitably powerful computer will be able to utilize the game’s built-in ray tracing functionality. Ray tracing is used to some degree in the game’s particle, light, reflection, and shadow effects, but not in the manner we identify with NVidia DLSS.

What hardware and software will you require?

Ray tracing requires a particular set of graphics processors to work properly. Unity has put up a useful list of those processors that is updated on a regular basis. Check that list for the most up-to-date information on the precise specifications needed, although you’ll need an Nvidia graphics chip that’s newer than the 2060T.

The past few years of video game development have seen a broad push toward the rendering of real-world objects. That tendency has recently intensified with the introduction of ray tracing in titles like Doom and The Ascent, a new AAA title that is perhaps the most promising ray-tracing-enabled game to date.. Read more about what is ray tracing and let us know what you think.