Cyberpunk 2077 and COD Cold War's new ray tracing trailers make me long for darkness

Hot off the heels of last night's Nvidia Ampere reveal, we also got new ray tracing trailers for Cyberpunk 2077, Minecraft, Watch Dogs Legion, and the newly announced Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War. I've collected them altogether below, but the Cyberpunk 2077 one is particularly shiny, if only because it's a new "max settings 4K trailer" showing CD Projekt Red's upcoming RPG at its very best. Let's take a look

It's still not entirely clear whether Cyberpunk 2077 will have day one ray tracing support when it launches on November 19th, or indeed which of the new RTX 30 series cards Nvidia used to capture all the footage. Was it the RTX 2080 Ti-level RTX 3070 that's set to cost just £469 / $499, or was it the more expensive RTX 3080, which promises double the performance of the existing RTX 2080? Or maybe it was the ludicrous RTX 3090, their 8K Titan-grade GPU that's complete overkill and could probably double up as an actual in-game weapon because it's so damn large?

It's not clear from the trailer, but whatever RTX 30 card they've used, it's almost certainly using their performance-enhancing DLSS tech to achieve the kinds of speeds you see in the trailer, which I'd imagine is going to be pretty much mandatory given all the ray tracing effects it's using.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will also be getting ray tracing and DLSS support when it comes out later this year, and you can see its new ray tracing gameplay trailer below. It's still pretty subtle, but at least they haven't felt the need to put giant green squares around the ray tracing bits this time, so at least that's a turn up for the books.

Nvidia haven't yet gone into detail about exactly what kind of ray tracing effects Cold War will have - only that they're working with Treyarch, Raven and Beenox to bring it to the game following their work on ray traced shadows in last year's Modern Warfare. Still, at least it's getting DLSS 2.0 support as well to help bump up those frame rates regardless.

As for Minecraft, Nvidia are releasing two new ray traced worlds for free, which you can see in the trailer below. The first is Portal Pioneers RTX by Cyclone Designs, which features a fully voiced story, an NPC robot companion and several different biomes that make the most of Minecraft's ray tracing effects, and the second is Fins n' Flippers by Razzleberries, which sees you restoring an abandoned aquarium on a huge island.

Finally, there's ye olde Watch Dogs Legions, which is also being bundled in for free with all RTX 30 cards from September 17th until October 29th. You can see its new 'Welcome to London' trailer below.

Nvidia confirmed that Watch Dogs Legion will also be getting DLSS support last night, as well as a fancy DLSS Ultra Performance mode for playing the game on 8K TVs, too, if you happen to be one of three people with enough cash to buy both the £1399 / $1499 RTX 3090 and one of LG's £3000 / $4000 8K OLED TVs. Still, while the Ultra Performance mode will be pretty much useless to the likes of you and me, I'm glad it's getting regular DLSS support, if only so our creaking RTX 20 cards can play it at a decent speed when it comes out next month.

For a reminder of all the other games that can make the most of Nvidia's fancy new RTX 30 cards, I've gathered together all the confirmed ray tracing and DLSS games right here.