Warframe graphics engine will be reworked, might get RTX and DLSS update

Warframe has always impressed me by its ability to deliver great visuals without bogging down my PC, and now they will be taking it up a notch with a new rendering engine. It is supposed to offer a lot more flexibility for developers to render lighting, while also not incurring a significant increase in system requirements. The latter, of course, is probably the most important part to us.

The blog post detailing the Enhanced graphics engine explains that previously the developers had to be very careful about dynamic lighting. Most of the visuals were precomputed to avoid the rendering engine calling for a full re-render of the scene every time a dynamic light was added to the scene. The new graphics engine would allow for more accurate reflections and also the ability to use more dynamic lighting and shadowing across the game.

While allowing for more detailed and realistic lighting, the new graphics engine is not expected to significantly increase system demands. Digital Extreme claims that “proper dynamic lighting costs hardly more than those terrible glow sprites we’ve used in the past”. With that said, they are still being cautious not to add dynamic lighting everywhere. For now, the focus seems to be the wide open world landscapes, which is quite understandable as realistic lighting there should be a lot more important than in the tight, dark corridors of the usual maps.

Right at the end of the post they also teased: “RTX ON? What’s next? Phasing out the legacy system will allow us to focus our efforts on one. This will open the doors for future exploration in new technologies. There’s a lot going on in ray-tracing and machine-learning augmentation of rendering… stay tuned!. ” Well, we’ll definitely be staying tuned.

Pokdepinion: Warframe is the best F2P game on any platform. Change my mind.