Extremely metal retro shooter Amid Evil now has RTX lighting
Amid Evil is my favorite blend of '90s aesthetics and modern tech in any retro shooter. It's pixely and full of low-poly enemies, but each world you travel through is wholly unique. You can kill snake men and sorcerers in a cosmic void and skate along the tops of gargantuan machinery in an oppressive no man's land. I played through every stage, and am planning to do it all again with RTX on thanks to today's update.
Amid Evil developer Indefatigable has been working on adding ray tracing since 2019 "for no reason other than it looks friggin' sweet," and it's been playable in beta form for more than a year. After a lot of testing, RTX has finally been integrated into the game, along with DLSS 2.0. Even if you don't have an RTX card, you may benefit from DLSS—this is one game you really want to play at 144 fps if possible.
When opening Amid Evil in Steam, there's now a launcher option to play with RTX support enabled. If you always want RTX support on, you can right-click the game, hit Properties, and paste "-dx12" (without the quotation marks) into the Launch Options field. Here's the list of Amid Evil's ray tracing options via its Steam page:
- Reflections: Reflections enables realistic reflections. This means you will be able to see things in reflections that would be behind the camera view. eg. Looking into a puddle and seeing the roof in high detail. Or behind you in a reflective wall.
- Screen Percent: Screen percent is the percentage of the screen that reflections will be traced at. You will get a lower resolution reflection the lower the %. Around 80% is a good balance of quality / performance.
- Shadows: Ray Traced shadows will enable shadow casting on enemies, and more accurate shadows from dynamic lights.
- Max Shadows: This adjusts the maximum amount of ray casting lights projecting shadows. Around 12 is a good balance of quality / performance.
- Light Boost: This will boost existing dynamic lights on decorations in the level (torches, spotlights etc). This comes at a performance cost.
- Reflect Boost: This will increase the threshold that reflections will be shown on materials. This comes at a performance cost.
Amid Evil's developers are also working on a "full prequel expansion" called The Black Labyrinth. No due date on that one just yet.