MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, the first single-player focused entry in the MechWarrior franchise since a decade and a half, is due for release on December 10th for the PC platform as an Epic Games store exclusive (for a year, after that it'll be on Steam and possibly other storefronts).

The game, originally scheduled to launch in December 2018, was confirmed a long time ago to feature NVIDIA RTX raytracing and DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). However, as it turns out, these features won't be actually available on launch day for MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries.

Here's what we learned from Russ Bullock, President of developer Piranha Games, in a follow-up to our pre-launch interview.

[...] As to RTX, we just found out yesterday that we're not going to have RTX at launch. There is a large committed effort to bring RTX to MechWarrior as soon as possible post-release. I am afraid that is all the details I have on the matter as of this time. Since our game release is so close to the Christmas break I would expect there to be an update very early in the new year.

Bullock later added that NVIDIA DLSS should be introduced at the same time as RTX in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries.

As to the specifics of the NVIDIA RTX and DLSS implementation, here's an excerpt from our interview with Producer Alexander Garden.

During our previous conversation, you told us the ray tracing optimization only allowed 1080p@60fps at the time, or 1080p@30fps with reflections enabled as well. Were you able to optimize this further to allow higher resolution gameplay with the ray tracing features enabled, at least on top of the line GPUs such as the RTX 2080 Super and RTX 2080Ti? We’ve been able to push the resolution ceiling a bit higher, and we’re continuing to work with their RTX team to optimize further. There’s likely to be a few post-release updates to make the experience even better. Back then, you were just about getting started with NVIDIA DLSS. What kind of performance improvements are you seeing on average? Paired with RTX the performance improvements are significant.

Check back tomorrow for our full interview on MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries with Alexander Garden, Producer at Piranha Games.