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Painkiller RTX is a path-traced upgrade to a classic but almost forgotten shooter
Digital Foundry gets to grips with a path-traced upgrade to a classic - but kind of forgotten - 2004 classic PC game.
Those visuals dazzled top-end GPU owners of the time, but like a great number of PC releases from that era, it had a DX7 fallback which culled the fancier shading effects and could even run on GPUs like the original GeForce. A narrative only exists in a loose sense with pre-rendered video that bookends the game’s chapters, acting only as a flimsy excuse to send the player to visually distinct levels that have no thematic linking beyond pointing you towards enemies that you should dispatch with a variety of weapons. | Image credit: Digital Foundry Make no mistake though: path tracing doesn't come cheap and to play this game at decent frame-rates, you either need to invest in high performance hardware or else accept some compromises to settings.
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