Ray tracing is not coming to Star Citizen any time soon

You don’t hear much about ray tracing these days, which is likely due to the fact that there’re very few games that actually support this technology. Still, in some cases, ray tracing may result in better performance, and there is a dedicated discussion on Star Citizen forums in regards to implementing ray tracing in the game. Players believe that the technology might save some work for the developers, but the developers themselves say that it’ll cost them a lot of time instead.

Ben Perry from Cloud Imperium responded with his own thoughts on the matter saying that ray tracing will most likely be a “massive headache and time-sink”. He did clarify later in the thread that supporting ray tracing in the game would be just an additional amount of work since the developers would have to maintain two graphics modes simultaneously. The one with ray tracing and the traditional one. Ray tracing can’t be utilized as a unified lighting solution, just because the devs can’t rely on it completely without breaking the game. And while it actually can result in a slightly better performance, the costs of it are unbearably high.

Ben Perry did note that he would love to test ray tracing in the game, but the ongoing development of Star Citizen has too many prioritized tasks to work on. In other words, even if the team does implement the technology it will add another year or two to the waiting for the game’s full release. Which is, of course, not even close at the moment.