505 Games’s sports car racing simulator Assetto Corsa Competizione was one of the 21 titles that were initially confirmed to feature ray tracing during NVIDIA’s RTX graphics cards announcement in August 2018. Now, a year later, the developers have admitted they gave up on the technology (for the time being, at least) for performance reasons.
Interestingly, NVIDIA had an entire blog post written about what ray tracing would bring to Assetto Corsa Competizione, such as “real-time, realistic mirroring of surrounding detail to cars, windows, and other reflective surfaces.” This is certainly fuel for critics who consider ray tracing nothing more than a marketing gimmick.
“Our priority is to improve, optimise, and evolve all aspects of ACC,” a member of the dev team writes. “If after our long list of priorities the level of optimisation of the title, and the maturity of the technology, permits a full blown implementation of RTX, we will gladly explore the possibility, but as of now there is no reason to steal development resources and time for a very low frame rate implementation.”