Star Citizen is a fantastic looking game and it leverages many classic rendering technologies to achieve that aesthetic and detail. One feature which some fans have been asking about since the launch of Nvidia's RTX Turing graphics cards, though, is ray tracing. It turns out though, that as much as looks are important to Star Citizen, the developers at Cloud Imperium Games do not see adding it as a priority and if anything, it'd be more of a "headache" than anything else.
Ray tracing in the form Nvidia's Turing graphics cards make possible, is a somewhat pretty, but extremely costly technology that requires a graphics card that costs hundreds of dollars and even then, you're unlikely to be able to run above 1440P, or even achieve 60 FPS. In games like Battlefield V it's even hard to see if it has any effect in game.
When asked by a Star Citizen fan whether ray tracing could actually save Cloud Imperium time during development, developer Ben Parry clarified by saying, "Not in the slightest. I expect, if we use it, it'll be a massive headache and time-sink but might give us some subtle improvements in looks or performance if we get it right."
Although he would like to use it to add better looking shadows to the game, he suggested that "The added headache is that whatever we offered would have to be an "as well" feature rather than an "instead", developing a feature for a single manufacturer's top-end cards means also maintaining feature parity for everyone else's hardware."
Considering only the most powerful graphics cards can even approach solid frame rates with ray tracing enabled, it seems unlikely that Cloud Imperium will make the effort to add the feature to its game any time soon.
