Since the release of the GeForce RTX 2080 back in 2018, NVIDIA has pushed the boundary on what’s possible through their game-enhancing technologies. Encompassing tech designed to push performance to the next level and make high-fidelity gaming a reality, RTX continues to support cutting-edge features such as ray-tracing, creating the most immersive games imaginable. Five years later they’re celebrating a huge milestone – that 500 games and apps are supported by RTX. To celebrate, we’re highlighting some of the best RTX games out there!
With the release of the all-new GeForce RTX 40 SUPER Series GPUs, NVIDIA has unleashed the next step in graphical gaming evolution, enhancing gaming, apps, and AI tasks. Powered by NVIDIA RTX, these GPUs take your gaming experience to the next level by delivering realistic graphics, incredibly fast performance, and new cutting-edge features like NVIDIA Reflex and the AI powered DLSS.
In celebration of RTX 500, we’re taking you on a tour of how games, across so many different genres, have been able to push boundaries through NVIDIA’s RTX tech. Some games have built the most photorealistic worlds imaginable, while others have created incredibly immersive worlds in the horror genre. For competitive gamers, RTX has been used to help shave off milliseconds of latency to even the playing field in fast paced gunfights.
Check out our favourites below!
Minecraft
The appeal of Minecraft's cute voxel worlds has never been strictly in the graphics, but there's no denying that Minecraft with RTX makes the classic survival-building game absolutely stunning. Thanks to ray tracing, sunlight shimmers through the blocky trees and glints off the water, oozing lava lights up the forests around it, and you get to experience the infinitude of player-created worlds like never before.
Being a pretty resource-light game anyway, Minecraft with RTX should run comfortably on any RTX 40-series GPU, but make sure to turn on DLSS to get the best possible performance.
Cyberpunk 2077
Following the release of its hit DLC Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely worth revisiting, especially with the power of an RTX 40 Super series GPU to back you up. Night City is the perfect place to appreciate the beauty of ray-tracing, with neon lights moodily bouncing off the world's chrome surfaces and puddles. Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, released in 2023, takes this spectacle to the next level by harnessing Path Tracing to amplify the already breathtaking lighting and graphics, simulating light authentically throughout the game.
With DLSS on you may even get to enjoy the game at that elusive 4K@60 quality. Finally, NVIDIA Reflex will bring even lower latency to the game and give the edge when fighting those formidable Cyberpsychos. You'll need every advantage you can get…
Portal with RTX
Portal, Valve’s first-person puzzler, saw in 2022 a transformative upgrade in Portal with RTX, bringing ray tracing, DLSS 3, and NVIDIA reflex to the award-winning title. Created with NVIDIA’s modding platform RTX Remix, Portal with RTX breathes new life into Aperture Laboratories with the most realistic and accurate lighting possible alongside a texture upgrade. Thanks to this upgrade, you can experience a more immersive experience as textured walls are illuminated by the puzzle cubes you carry around, and those iconic orange and blue portals beautifully bounce their respective glow off the surrounding surfaces.
Best of all, if you already own Portal, then this RTX update is absolutely free, making it a budget-friendly way to dabble in the power of ray-tracing.
Alan Wake 2
One of the weirdest, wildest games of 2023, Alan Wake 2 is not only a masterful piece of creative storytelling, but also a graphical tour de force. Immerse yourself in a beautiful, realistic world thanks to DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction and Path Tracing, enhancing the game's lighting, reflections and shadows and bringing a new level to the dazzling light-based gameplay. With NVIDIA tech, you can escape the darkness while multiplying frame rates by an average of 4x at 4K resolution. Impressive stuff, and certainly the best way to experience Remedy’s instant classic.
Crysis Remastered
"Can it run Crysis?" Yeah, these days it probably can, but crank on that ray-tracing, expand that resolution to 4K, and Crytek's graphically pioneering 2007 shooter will put even a modern PC to the test. However, the game looks and runs brilliantly on the RTX 40-series, though of course with the benefit of DLSS 3 you can churn out many more frames at no extra strain to your GPU. Oh, and don't forget about NVIDIA Reflex to give you an advantage in shootouts befitting of the Super Soldier you are.
Little Nightmares II
On an art direction level, Little Nightmares 2 is one of the most beautiful games around, with its claymation-like style giving it a deep, tactile quality you just want to reach out and touch with your fingers. The 2.5D horror-platformer sees you sneaking around spooky, gloomy locales while giant, disturbingly designed monsters hunt you down. NVIDIA’s RTX tech elevates how light plays in the game, adding better shadows, light interaction and particles to really take the immersion to the next level.
The effects of ray-tracing are a bit more subtle here, but still add up to make the already gorgeous environments feel more grounded and dynamic.
THE FINALS
An exciting new addition to the first-person shooter scene, THE FINALS is a free-to-play title based in a combat-centred game show. The fast-paced arena shooter sees teams of three bounding around smartly designed arenas vying to collect, carry, and bank boxes of cash.
As the landscape changes and buildings come crashing down, the world’s lighting and shadows are updated in real-time thanks to RTX Global Illumination, letting you blow down doors without losing your immersive experience. Alongside this, THE FINALS supports DLSS 3.5 as well as NVIDIA Reflex, which lowers latency and gives you precious milliseconds of edge in those high-octane shootouts.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3 is a game that keeps on giving, and in 2022 the open-world RPG received a massive visual overhaul with the Complete Edition, a big part of which was the addition of DLSS, ray-tracing, and NVIDIA Reflex.
From the way light shimmers off the wheatfields of Velen, to the blood-red glow of the setting sun dappling in through the treetops, the haunting world really comes to life with the power of ray-tracing. Just whack on DLSS to offset the performance hit, and you're all set.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales
This spin-off to the beloved Marvel's Spider-Man may only clock in at around eight hours in length, but in that time you're in for all-slinging, all-swinging ride as the titular hero, who our reviewer Mollie Taylor says is "a more interesting and personable character than Peter Parker's various iterations."
Enable ray-tracing, and the bright lights of New York City will glimmer off the snow on the ground, while the glass skyscrapers will perfectly reflect the buildings opposite them. Of all the games in this list, Miles Morales is a powerful showcase of how Ray Traced Reflections and Shadows push the game's graphical fidelity to the next level. And, if you play with a GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU, you can experience the game with DLSS 3, accelerating its performance at 4K by a whopping 2x!
Fortnite
You may not think of the undemanding, cartoony and relatively flat-textured Fortnite as the best game to showcase the capabilities of NVIDIA's 40-series graphical tech, but look a little closer and you'll see the differences. There are plenty of reflective surfaces in the game, and you'll now get to enjoy the light bounce off, reflect, and refract off them as it naturally would.
Whether you elect to use ray-tracing or not, you'll want maximum frames and the lowest possible latency for a competitive game like this, so play around with the DLSS and NVIDIA Reflex settings to find that sweet spot of performance and graphics.
Life Is Strange: True Colors
The latest entry in Deck Nine's award-winning narrative adventure series is a powerful coming-of-age drama about a young queer woman with the power to read people's emotions. While it's by no means a game dependent on flashy graphics, its vibrant, brightly coloured world really pops thanks to the power of ray-tracing.
Our reviewer Rachel loved Life is Strange: True Colors, praising its thoughtful exploration of emotional intelligence and declaring that she's "never had this much fun with a Life is Strange game."
