Gaijin Entertainment announced that War Thunder, its popular free-to-play wargame, just received Update 1.95. Dubbed 'Northern Wind', the patch also adds major graphics features such as raytracing (for Global Illumination) and High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on both PC and Xbox One. As far as we know, this is the first console game to support raytracing, whereas raytracing on PC isn't limited to GeForce RTX either as it will work with any DirectX 11 GPU, just like Wargaming and Crytek demonstrated with their enCore RT and Neon Noir tech demos.

It is unclear at this point if the RT cores available in GeForce RTX GPUs provide any improvement in War Thunder. Below you can find comments from the developers at Gaijin on the implementation of raytraced Global Illumination (which we had previously discussed with Gaijin CEO Anton Yudintsev) and HDR.

EVGA’s GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN Shatters 3DMark Port Royal World Record, Overclocked To An Insane 2580 MHz

For the full patch notes of War Thunder Update 1.95, go here.