Need For Speed Underground Gets Ray Tracing With Mod

Need for Speed: Underground Redux, the 2017 mod by AMTxDRxRL, brought a number of visual upgrades to the 2003 game. The mod enhanced textures through Reshade, and it’s back in the spotlight again thanks to ray tracing. A different modder, Stre1itzia, decided to port the original Redux mod to the latest version of Reshade, and add new ray traced shaders of their own. The modder posted the results in the video below, showing quite the upgrade. Although there’s currently no way to download these tweaks, Stre1itzia says you should expect a massive performance hit. The game’s performance is three-times lower than running it with vanilla Redux, though this could improve with optimisation. It’s not quite clear exactly what ray tracing is being applied to here, so some of these settings may well be toggleable. If nothing else, the footage lets us peer into the future a little bit to see what a next-gen Need for Speed could look like.

Thanks, DualShockers.