A Plague Tale: Requiem quietly adds ray tracing on PC

Something you could never accuse A Plague Tale: Requiem of is a lack of eye candy. As grim, gory, and engulfed in rats as this medieval stealth adventure is, mon dieu is it a looker on PC. For those among us with one of the brawnier graphics cards on the market, it’s just become even prettier too, via the slightly delayed implementation of ray tracing.

Only ray traced shadows, to be precise, though a quick test by Wccftech suggests they do amount to a visible (if subtle) improvement. And at a relatively minor performance cost too, though since A Plague Tale: Requiem only supports Nvidia DLSS, and not it rivals like AMD FSR, only GeForce RTX GPUs will be able to claw back some frames-per-second with upscaling sorcery. That includes DLSS 3 support, by the by, which remains exclusive to the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 for now. Oof, I really need to finish that review sometime.

Speaking of delays, Requiem released in October 2022, so it’s taken a few months for developers Asobo Studio to get those traced rays in a shippable state. Hints towards the feature were present in the game’s .ini file back at launch, mind, so the arrival of RT shadows might not come as a surprise if you’ve been keeping a close eye on proceedings. What is unusual is the lack of fanfare: normally when a game gets flashy PC extras like ray tracing or DLSS, it’s all over Nvidia’s blog, or at the very least announced in a tweet. I can’t even find patch notes for the update in question, Update 1.004.

Ah well. Ray traced shadows, they’re there if you want ‘em. Also, this post-launch polish of Requiem’s visuals has reminded me – what the heck happened to that Elden Ring ray tracing update supposedly in the works? Besides that one modder managing to enable a completely busted version of it?