has arrived, and with it comes the much-anticipated addition of ray tracing effects. Both ray traced shadows and reflections are now available to enable in the settings menu, along with some extra goodies, so I jumped in for a bit of testing to see what sort of performance you can expect when engaging the new shinies.
I based my benchmarking runs on the Labyrinth of Rot dungeon in the Underoot, a moody, slimy area west of Carrigar. Plenty of opportunity to test out some ray traced shadows then, and a decently high enemy count to see how all the chaos onscreen translates to your overall performance with the new options engaged.
So, Diablo 4 can run plenty smooth with ray tracing enabled as long as you keep the Nvidia helping hand engaged, however with it off the game can get plenty stuttery, too. As usual with Frame Generation I noticed no drop in visual quality with it on, and would much prefer to keep my frames up above the 60 fps mark in a game where smoothness in the midst of all the onscreen chaos feels paramount..
Of course, it all looks a bit better if you really pay attention to the shadows and the odd bit of water, but the truth is that Diablo 4's baked-in lighting combined with the visually dense environments looked great to begin with. I also noticed the odd bit of traversal hitching since the new update, which I don't remember being an issue in versions past, even with ray tracing turned off.
A mixed bag of an update then. Ray tracing effects in D4? You can keep 'em, but I'll take the extra frame rate boost, please. Those gory, dingy environments always looked great to begin with, but anything that helps keeps them silky smooth is more than fine with me.