How far we've come. Back at Gamescom 2018, the Digital Foundry team was hugely impressed by 4A Games' real-time global illumination technology, powered by the ray tracing hardware acceleration made possible by Nvidia's RTX 2080 Ti. There was just one problem - Team Green's top-end GPU struggled to sustain 60 frames per second at 1080p resolution, and if the this card was struggling, how would the lower-end cards compare? Thankfully, the final game possessed a revelatory increase in performance, and the goalposts have shifted dramatically, to the point where we wondered: can the 2080 Ti lock to anything like 4K60? And just what kind of ray tracing experience can you get on the RTX 2060, Nvidia's least capable ray tracing model.
Suffice to say, this exercise is going to require some serious settings tweaking - similar to our prior tests with Battlefield 5 running on the RTX 2060. And yes, it may well involve some overclocking too. But one of the biggest challenges facing us is actually a lack of granularity in the settings. But even if we are applying very coarse changes to the game here, settings tweaks are the place to start if we are going to try to achieve 60 frames per second locks. Global presets consisting of low, medium, high, ultra and extreme settings are available - but we can take low off the table as it's not compatible with ray tracing.
Each preset tends to gradually diminish volumetric lighting quality, and shadow map cascade quality. Dropping down to medium settings kills off shadows on foliage, and other unpleasant effects start to kick in, such as a noticeable reduction on screen-space relections. Our quest for a locked 60fps with ray tracing shouldn't come at the expense of a brutally compromised experience elsewhere, and I found that the high preset maintains most of the game's beauty, while acting as a very close mirror to 4A's own choices for the Xbox One X version - a good place on which to base our testing.