Nope, surprisingly it is a DX11 application with a traditional rendering pipeline. This is all PBR-rasterized; nothing raytraced.
They said they might have plans to port to DX12 in the future, but not before the release.
long story short moving object color casting light is the main visible difference that cannot be replicated with traditional techniques (like baking the light reflection in the scene at built time, but can be faked convincingly); ray-tracing is also not limited at reflecting elements that are on the scene like what you'd get from screen space reflection, which is less noticeable of an effect but is there if you pay attention and know what to look for.
I'll take anything that would mean the community doesn't need to keep modifying .CFG parameters to get an extra few FPS
Outside of that use case a 2070 super makes far more sense (wasnt out when I bought mine though).
But this part in the article sounds weird to me:
> the new engine brings higher-fidelity collision detection, which makes things like bumpy runways, braking on slick surfaces, varying degrees of friction, etc. much more nuanced. Under the hood, the development team has done significant work with integration, using something called adaptive time steps. The upshot is that the simulation now always updates at the same frequency as the visual frame rate.
This sounds more like the physics solver can run adaptively at whatever timestep currently needed, based on the simulation conditions for the frame, no?
Edit: Sounds like a framedrop results in a dropped physics solver iteration as well I suppose?