Source 2, Valve’s graphics engine, may be about to receive support for Ray Tracing / RTX. It seems that the first game that will adopt this technology will be Artifact.
Source 2, Valve’s graphics engine, could receive support for Ray Tracing / RTX
To take into account, currently, the games that use Source 2 are Half-Life Alyx, Dota 2, DOTA Underlords, and Artifact. It is not clear what exactly these updates that appeared recently mean, but we can suppose that they will bring great things to the graphic engine and, therefore, to the Valve games.
Source 2 is possibly getting RTX/Raytracing support.
Last Artifact Beta got "Raytracing Shader" and "RTX" strings added.https://t.co/UEuBP6PEue pic.twitter.com/k6Ks1Q8DWJ
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) January 14, 2021
Anyway, keep in mind that this does not mean, at least for now, that Half-Life: Alyx will also receive support for Ray Tracing or DLSS. Valve did not communicate anything about this at the moment, although if indeed Artifact receives support for RTX, the Source 2 engine will already be compatible with the technology.
It will be interesting to see when NVIDIA and Valve will officially reveal RTX support for Artifact. Of course, this also makes us look forward to a new Half-Life release or a new Portal that exploits this technology.