War Thunder adds new Path Traced lighting with support for DLSS, FSR, and XeSS

War Thunder requires no introduction; the free-to-play, military-themed, massively multiplayer game has been offering players the opportunity to immerse themselves in real-world aviation, armored vehicles, and naval craft for over a decade. In that time, the game has received countless updates, with its latest, the Leviathans major update, adding real-time path-traced lighting to the game.

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Now, when most gamers hear the phrase "path tracing," their mind goes directly to a high-end GPU like the GeForce RTX 5080. Granted, Path Tracing is extremely hardware-intensive, but War Thunder developer Gaijin Entertainment is limiting the technology to Path Traced Global Illumination, or PTGI. Alongside the new path-traced lighting, the studio is embracing new tech to boost ray-tracing performance.

This includes support for Opacity Micro Maps (OMM) and Shader Execution Reordering, which are currently included in the latest preview version of the DirectX SDK. War Thunder already features ray-traced shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion, and with the new Path Traced Global Illumination, the game looks even more impressive.

According to the developers, Path Tracing offers more consistent and realistic global lighting, which is often associated with sunlight. In the following examples, showcasing PTGI off (top) versus on (bottom), the difference is immediately noticeable, with the PTGI-enhanced visuals appearing more cinematic and realistic.

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In a multiplayer game like War Thunder, performance is everything, so to ensure that some gamers out there (those with capable GPUs) can experience the new and improved lighting, the game can be played with NVIDIA's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation technologies to boost performance. Of course, PTGI is not for everyone, and to showcase just how well War Thunder scales, the developer closes out its big Path Tracing deep dive with a clip showcasing the game running at 70-90 FPS on the new MSI Claw 8 gaming handheld. Naturally, this is with the game's "medium" graphics setting and no PTGI.