As indicated by an engine showcase shared today, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment are hard at work on a new Avatar game called Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora that will capitalize on modern graphics technologies such as ray tracing. According to a new interview with the game’s technical director, Nikolay Stefanov, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s ray tracing effects cannot be turned off at all because the title was designed from the ground up to be a true next-gen title and doesn’t offer any other rendering method for the lighting. Luckily, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora features some level of support for software-based ray tracing, which means that users stuck with older GPUs can still enjoy the game. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will obviously run best on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series and AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards thanks to their dedicated ray tracing hardware and newer architectures, however.
Alternatively, the necessary calculations in the new Avatar game can also be carried out using the classic compute shaders. The crucial question, however, will be how quickly this can be done. Stefanov couldn’t give us the exact performance data, but he at least states that the ray tracing calculations using the compute shader run “surprisingly fast.”
Sources: GameStar, r/hardware