Enlisted‘s next major update will give console players a new way to trade performance for image quality, while PC players will get path-traced global illumination, new ray tracing optimizations, and more frame generation choices.
Darkflow Software detailed the upcoming changes in an official Steam announcement. The same update also covers planned melee and shader changes, alongside Battle Rating queues and balance work.
Console ray tracing presets target 30 fps
Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 5 Pro will receive a new ray tracing preset that targets 30 fps with dynamic resolution. Xbox Series X and the standard PS5 will get ray-traced sun shadows, ambient occlusion, and reflections, though dynamic objects will not be included in the acceleration structure for now.
PS5 Pro will receive ray-traced sun and dynamic shadows in addition to ambient occlusion and reflections. Its stronger GPU will also allow the game to run close to native 4K resolution most of the time. Xbox Series S will not receive a ray tracing preset because its memory budget cannot support the feature.
PTGI brings bounced lighting to PC
PC players will be able to enable path-traced global illumination, or PTGI. The effect traces indirect lighting through the full scene and can bounce rays up to three times, allowing light from a sunlit surface to brighten areas that do not directly face the source.
PTGI uses the complete bounding volume hierarchy rather than relying only on signed distance fields or screen-space information. Its output can be noisy, so DLSS Ray Reconstruction is required to enable the feature.
Several techniques will reduce PTGI’s performance cost. Checkerboard tracing can cut the ray tracing workload in half, while Monte Carlo early termination discards dim rays and preserves the expected lighting result. Screen-space resampling can reuse lighting from the previous frame when a ray remains visible, and lower-quality material mip levels will be used because PTGI provides low-frequency ambient light.
PTGI also includes ambient occlusion through its full-scene tracing, so RTAO turns off when the feature is enabled. Flamethrowers and other effects will contribute to the lighting as well. Effect tracing will focus on the first bounce and accept the first four hits, with a similar shortcut available for rough reflections.
New hardware features target forests and reflections
Opacity micromaps will replace traditional any-hit shaders for supported ray tracing hardware. The feature stores whether tiny sections of alpha-tested geometry are transparent or opaque, reducing the shader work required for leaves, branches, and other dense vegetation. Darkflow Software says the change will improve performance in areas with forests while removing the false hits created by the previous limit on any-hit shader calls.
Opacity micromaps will be enabled on compatible hardware and currently support NVIDIA RTX 40 and RTX 50 series GPUs. The developer also recommends updating graphics drivers before using the new features. Memory usage will remain roughly unchanged.
Bright tracers will now appear in the ray tracing structure too, allowing their reflections to show up on surfaces such as water and glass.
PC gets a dedicated ray tracing preset
A new PC ray tracing preset will provide a quick way to use the game’s highest recommended settings for compatible graphics cards. It includes the Ultra settings along with ray-traced shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections on opaque surfaces, glass, and water, plus additional clutter.
The update will remove support for low-quality Temporal Hyper Resolution and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0. Motion vectors will always render above the bare minimum settings, which should improve temporal effects and remove workarounds that could create new artifacts.
Frame generation adds AMD and NVIDIA options
AMD FSR frame generation will arrive with the update and will require DirectX 12. DLSS frame generation will add 5x and 6x options, along with dynamic frame generation that changes the ratio automatically to keep the resulting frame rate consistent. Dynamic frame generation requires an NVIDIA RTX 50 series card.
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Enlisted
Developed by Darkflow Software
Enlisted is a squad-based first person MMO shooter covering key battles from World War II. The game carefully recreates weapons, military vehicles and the atmosphere of that era, while demonstrating really massive clashes of numerous soldiers, tanks and aircraft with artillery and naval support.
Most of the Enlisted game modes simulate a battle involving several infantry platoons and gives the player control over a squad of soldiers with various roles (i.e. submachine gun soldier, sniper, radio operator, rifleman and others), a whole military vehicle crew or an aircraft pilot. One of the fighters is controlled directly, while others move and shoot independently following the player's general orders. In a situation where all the soldiers in the squad have fallen, a player respawns with the next available squad. This decision makes Enlisted battles look massive and spectacular while keeping the input of each individual player in the overall team victory quite significant.
- Genre Shooter, Simulator
- Platforms Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, Linux, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 5, Xbox One
- Perspective First person, Third person
- Modes Multiplayer, Co-operative, Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)
- Release November 10, 2020
- Publisher Gaijin Entertainment
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Age Rating
