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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is premiering at E3
The new avatar game Frontiers of Pandora from Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment (The Division 2) was visually one of the most impressive titles of this year’s E3, as the trailer above shows. To make this possible, the developers rely on ray tracing without compromise.
Technical Director Nikolay Stefanov revealed this to us in an interview when we asked him, with regard to ray tracing, whether we can switch the individual areas of it (lighting, reflections, shadows) on and off individually, as in Cyberpunk 2077, for example:
“[Avatar] becomes a title that only appears with ray tracing. But we’re developing the game so that the quality and performance will be scalable. “
Ray tracing is by no means the only aspect in which Avatar relies fully on “Next Gen”. How important a fast SSD is for the game and what Massive Entertainment had to change on the Snowdrop engine to make Avatar possible, you can find out at GameStar Plus:
more on the subject
How Avatar should become the first real next-gen game for the PC
Hardware accelerated ray tracing is not mandatory
The above statement by Stefanov naturally made us sit up and take notice. However, he can put our minds at ease with regard to the system requirements: graphics cards that can accelerate ray tracing via hardware, such as Nvidia’s RTX 3000 GPUs or AMD’s RX 6000 models, are not necessary.
Alternatively, the necessary calculations in the new Avatar game can also be carried out using the classic compute shaders. The key question, however, will be how quickly this can be done.
Stefanov was unable to give us the exact performance data, but he at least states that the ray tracing calculations are carried out using a compute shader »surprisingly fast compared to the hardware-accelerated variant” to run.
When does Frontiers of Pandora come out? The game is scheduled to hit the market in 2022, but there is no exact release date yet. In addition to the PC, the title will also be available for the next-gen consoles PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S as well as for the cloud gaming platforms Google Stadia and Amazon Luna.
