Even though it was one of the very earliest showcases of Nvidia’s RTX lineup of graphics cards way back in 2019, Atomic Heart hasn’t officially supported ray tracing proper. It’s been a good looking game, to be sure, but ray-traced it wasn’t. Unless you’ve got the latest update, that is.
Indeed, Atomic Heart has finally received a proper set of ray tracing graphic settings for players to peruse, almost a year and a half after its initial release on PC. The update – patch 1.14.4.0 – is fairly exciting in a few different ways, mind, as it comes with a surprisingly comprehensive array of accessibility features and a set of new Steam achievements for one of the game’s DLCs, but ray-traced graphics are definitely the belle of the bunch. Just note that they’re currently still in public beta, as it were.
Atomic Heart’s ray tracing support is now in beta
Upon installing the 1.14.4.0 version of Atomic Heart on PC, you’ll be greeted with an all-new ‘Ray Tracing’ graphics setting in the menu. This beta version of the option allows you to set ray tracing to Performance, Quality, or Balance mode depending on your hardware and preference, which will elevate the game’s visual fidelity a few notches beyond its already impressive baseline.
This, of course, comes with a hefty performance malus. Further, you’ll also need a DXR-enabled graphics card with at least 12 GB of VRAM for ray tracing to work properly in Atomic Heart. This is a tad funny in hindsight, of course, as even though Atomic Heart was initially demoed on the now-humble RTX 2000 series of Nvidia graphics cards, it’s clear that the game’s current ray-traced graphics are still going to push even the latest RT-ready GPUs to the max.
If you’re uninterested in ray tracing for whatever reason, Atomic Heart‘s new suite of accessibility settings might prove more meaningful to you. The new update allows you to tweak all of the following settings however you wish:
- Quick-time event auto-completion
- Colorblind mode (Deuteranopia, Protanopia, Tritanopia)
- Special contrast mode
- Black and white mode
- Environmental object highlights
- Camera shake settings
- Puzzle auto-solving
- Auto-healing
Not bad, right? Patch 1.14.4.0 is now available for all PC players of Atomic Heart on PC, so give it a whirl.
