Fortnite and Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War get Nvidia RTX support

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Flossing by firework-light, and teetering on the brink of nuclear annihilation, just got a whole lot prettier.

(Image credit: Epic Games/Activision)

At the GeForce Special Event today, Nvidia announced Fortnite and Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War will be among the first wave of games after the announcement of the RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 to support RTX. That’s right, not only is Epic Games jumping on the bandwagon, but Activision is turning 'RTX on' for its newest addition to the Black Ops series.

Nvidia has also unleashed a new trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, if you're interested—yet another member of the RTX gang:

Ray tracing calculates lighting in real time with incredible precision. That means more accurate reflections in gloss and metal surfaces, better shadows, intense ambient occlusion, and more profound texture detail that’ll have you getting shot in the back of the head while you stare at the most convincing brick walls you’ve seen.

Fortnite is going to make use of:

  • Ray-traced reflections – Recreates the way light reflects on glossy and metal surfaces, including smooth natural mirrors like window glass and rougher surfaces like brushed metal. 
  • Ray-traced shadows – Accurately models shadowing on many surfaces while enhancing surface and contact detail, and fixes problems associated with traditional shadow techniques.
  • Ray-traced global illumination – Calculates world lighting with massively increased precision, illuminating Fortnite’s environments, players and characters with unprecedented detail, fidelity and clarity. 
  • Ray-traced ambient occlusion – Where objects or surfaces meet, light is occluded, creating subtle shadows that can highlight the slightest of surface details. 

Soon you’ll be experiencing Fortnite’s Battle Royale, Creative, and Save the World modes in intense real-time, ray-traced glory. With AI-accelerated frame rates and the new low-latency, esports technology suite—NVIDIA Reflex—you won’t be able to blame your bad reaction times on your GPU ever again.

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Fortnite is set to use Nvidia's AI-powered Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) to make sure that even though you get the highest graphical fidelity with ray tracing, it isn't going to tank your performance. At least maybe not with the new RTX 30-series cards anyway.

And with the RTX 3070 starting out at just $499, with RTX 2080 Ti level gaming performance, ray tracing could be about to get more attainable. 

Katie Wickens
Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.