What horrors lurk in the shadows? What nightmarish undead monstrosities roam the streets at night? What is humanity willing to lose to survive? Dying Light 2 Stay Human is an open-world action-RPG set in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak, where fast-paced parkour movement is as essential as a trusty bat or blade in hand. A vast, brutal, and challenging experience where darkness and light are key players in exploring its post-apocalyptic world and the engaging story it tells.

No matter the platform you play it on, the development team at Techland have gone to great lengths to convey the tension that comes from running through a darkened corridor, being chased by a speedy creature -- or creatures -- of the night, trying to reach dawn’s light. The first game’s motto was “Good Night, Good Luck”, and in its sequel this mantra is truer than ever.

Modern technology and hardware advances have helped elevate this kind of immersion via a heady mix of lighting, visual effects, art direction, animation, and detailed environments. Not just to sell any given scene and the game’s desperate setting, but to also offer gameplay opportunities only possible within this intricate setup.


And on PC, Dying Light 2’s immersion goes several steps further thanks to a suite of ray-tracing effects and NVIDIA DLSS rendering. The difference is staggering, with Dying Light 2 being one of the most impressive examples of what ray-tracing can deliver in an expansive open-world. Ray-traced shadows, global illumination, reflections, ambient occlusion and more, add depth to every inch of the city of Villedor, it’s residents and its outskirts.

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The difference is staggering, with Dying Light 2 being one of the most impressive examples of what ray-tracing can deliver in an expansive open-world.

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No matter if it’s a building basking in the light of the midday sun or a dark and seemingly empty room full of potential terror in the shuffling unease of night, ray-tracing adds a unified cinematic quality that keeps the game’s tension seamless. With a full day-night cycle and the freedom to explore a huge number of buildings and points of interest, ray-tracing is a literal game changer.

Which you can see in the following video.



As we saw with the PC versions of Cyberpunk 2077 and Remedy’s brilliant Control, it’s the combination of multiple ray-tracing effects coming together that creates such a stunning transformation. Reflections allow metallic surfaces to correctly reflect incoming light, not to mention adding proper reflections to, well, reflective surfaces. Ray-traced shadows allow the light coming from the sun to accurately create Dying Light 2’s dense mix of bright and dark. It allows shadows to become softer when they need to be, and sharper too.

Related: Our Full Dying Light 2 Stay Human Review

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Ray-traced shadows also add depth to grass and foliage, which double as gameplay elements when hiding from the world’s many dreads. Ray-traced ambient occlusion ensures that when objects meet the world, they are not fully lit in the way that can give the overall feeling they’re floating and you’re simply looking “at a videogame”. The same can be said about objects that are visible and bright when they shouldn’t be, like the underside of a table or the side of a building facing away from the sun. Ray-tracing makes things look how they do in the real world.

But even that’s only a part of the story.


One way to describe the effect, in relation to Dying Light 2’s ray-tracing, is balance. The simple idea that the interplay of light and shadow changes gradually throughout the course of the day and where you are. Sitting inside a train-car with a single opening and no working lights, you can see how quickly the light seeping in turns to shadow and darkness. Using traditional lighting methods which rely on faking it, the same train-car is fully lit in a way that is unrealistic. When it comes to exploring a world as dangerous as the one depicted here, the act of entering a room or structure that is poorly lit the way that it should be -- well, the difference is transformative.

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Ray-traced shadows also add depth to grass and foliage, which double as gameplay elements when hiding from the world’s many dreads. Ray-traced ambient occlusion ensures that when objects meet the world, they are not fully lit in the way that can give the overall feeling they’re floating and you’re simply looking “at a videogame”.

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Ray-tracing accurately bounces and traces light around a scene which drives the rendering of things like shadows, the luminance and colour of objects, how a metallic object might reflect light from a lamp, and so forth. “Faking it” is by no means said to diminish the quality of lighting found in the game with ray-tracing disabled. From shadows to reflections to calculating all the light of a cinematic sequence, realism can still shine through.


The train-car example is just one of countless moments found throughout Dying Light 2. Each presents a completely different take on how realistic a scene or moment can look and feel, which in turn alters how you perceive the world. Ray-tracing increases the immersion; the tension and horror. The game’s awe and mystery, because of light -- as per the introduction -- is a key player in the fully delivered experience. It is, after all, in the game’s name.

If one ray-tracing effect needs to be highlighted above all others, it would have to be ray-traced global illumination. Which refers to how a light source like the sun is absorbed by objects; it defines the colour and brightness. The profound effect this has on Dying Light 2’s environments is mind-blowing. Suddenly a location looks how you would expect it to, and that moment where you transition from outdoor to indoor becomes seamless and natural and cinematic. Sunset gives objects and windowed interiors a suitably orange hue, with the bright midday sun giving something like a concrete jungle a sort of glowing white aura.


There is of course a cost to all of this, and that comes with the taxing and complicated nature of calculating and rendering ray-traced effects in real-time. So much so it’s the reason the term ‘hardware-based ray-tracing’ has become a mainstay in modern graphics. With NVIDIA’s pioneering efforts to make real-time ray-tracing a reality with the GeForce RTX 20 series in 2018, the current Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series pushes things even further. To the point where RTX-based technology is required to make Dying Light 2, with all ray-tracing effects enabled, a reality.

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With ray-tracing and DLSS, Dying Light 2 is every bit a true next-gen showcase for where in-game visuals are headed.

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From the GeForce RTX 3050 all the way up to the GeForce RTX 3080, RT Cores handle all the mathematical action required to enable ray-tracing. It’s the addition of Tensor Cores and the AI-based DLSS rendering that makes Dying Light 2’s ray-tracing a reality on even the most high-end PC hardware. DLSS is something that probably needs no introduction, so we’ll give you the quick elevator pitch: it’s a form of powerful upscaling that uses AI to reconstruct an image with motion. This is done to make it look on par and sometimes even better than the natively-rendered equivalent.

A very real form of digital sorcery, DLSS offers a generation-style performance bump. With ray-tracing and DLSS, Dying Light 2 is every bit a true next-gen showcase for where in-game visuals are headed. And for a game where heading out at night is an exercise in sheer terror, there’s just something about being comforted by realistic lighting that gives you the energy you need to take on the zombie hordes, even if they are hiding in all-too realistic shadows.