The Ascent Ray Tracing

[Tory Lattin]

Irecognize it, that ascent value stops counting sporadically although altitude is increasing. Than after a while (20-30min), ascent value jumps (e.g. from 303m up to 589m), continue increasing and stops again.

I finally found my own examples to share. This was an occasion when it happened and I thought to take a screenshot. It's not the worst instance and it does seem to happen most of the time. Elevation gain suddenly jumps from 100' to 268' in 2.5 minutes and negligible distance.

From the summit the pair headed down the east ridge and then made five or six rappels down the Fourth Gully. Something happened near the bottom of the gully, and they never made it out. The scale of the ensuing rescue and recovery attempt is a tribute to the impact these two men had on communities across the world.

The exact line of their first ascent of the north face will likely forever remain unknown. However, I had the honor of attempting this same face with Ryan in October 2015. We began on the left side on the face and climbed a long, steep apron of snow, eventually roping up and climbing one long pitch up a blank slab covered by a thin veneer of powder. Encountering airy snow and ice that was climbable but not protectable, we decided to bail. As I stared up at the face above, I remember tracing a zigzagging line of thin ice daggers and slanting snow ramps that seemed to offer the most feasible path up the rearing granite wall. I imagine that Ryan and Marc had better conditions than we did in 2015, but there is no doubt theupper half of this 750m wall would have presented an extremely challenging combination of ice and mixed climbing.

The Ascent is a cyberpunk action RPG with ray tracing and DLSS. Sometimes. Sometimes it's a cyberpunk action RPG with ray tracing and no DLSS. Sometimes that ray tracing implementation may not work at all. And whether you get those Nvidia settings all depends on where you access the PC version from.

The Microsoft Game Pass version of The Ascent seems to be a more lightweight version than the build you can download right now from Steam. Both DirectX 12 ray tracing and DLSS are front and centre and working out of the digital box on Valve's storefront, but if you grab The Ascent as part of your Game Pass sub then you're only given direct access to part of the settings picture.

I've been running the game from my Steam library and it looks, and plays, great. I mean, it's demanding as all hell with everything turned up to ultra with ray-traced shadow, reflections, and ambiont (sic) occlusion enabled. Even with DLSS on the quality setting, and running at 3440x1440, the GeForce RTX 3090 in this machine is straining at between 75 and 90 fps.

Our Jacob, on the other hand, is experiencing a world of pain with his Game Pass install. For one thing there are no DLSS options at all, something that has bizarrely been noted as lacking in a reddit thread where it's noted as not a platform feature of Windows 10, and only on Steam.

After the DLSS .dll files were made available via TechPowerUp you'd hope that maybe it would just be a simple drag and drop into a specific binaries folder. Unfortunately that is simply not how Game Pass games arrive on your PC. They're packaged up as almost individual entities, and while we could navigate through the folders, we were unable to add in the necessary files, and were simply told there wasn't enough space to drop them in as if the game itself were a drive.

Looks like we're going to have to hope that developers, Neon Giant, are able to patch the Game Pass version to add DLSS in, because right now there's no Nvidia AI support for your in-game frame rates.

For Jacob, it doesn't matter whether he's got ray tracing enabled or not, he's still hitting the same performance numbers either way, and the image on screen looks no different. In short, we have to assume that ray tracing is bricked on The Ascent Game Pass version too.

I mean sure, he can still play the game, and the world of The Ascent looks mighty pretty, in a gritty cyberpunk way, without ray tracing enabled. But the fact that we have two distinct versions of the game running on effectively the same platform is really strange. All we can assume is that Neon Giant had to get an earlier build of the game to Microsoft for Game Pass day one availability, and is more able to deliver up to date builds via Steam.

At least with Nier: Automata it was the other way around, and the Steam version was the broken build that time. Still, different storefronts on the same platform shouldn't have different versions of the same game. We haven't been able to find any confirmation that a future DLSS patch will be happening, but here's hoping we get some update over the weekend for our Game Pass buddies.

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Dave JamesSocial Links NavigationManaging Editor, HardwareDave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.

Slab-derived supercritical liquids separate into aqueous fluids and hydrous melts during their migration. Separated aqueous fluids further release melt components that cannot be dissolved during ascent. During these processes, elemental partitioning occurs, which may contribute to the geochemical evolution of subduction-zone fluids. Here, we report new experimental results of partition coefficients between a hydrous dacitic melt and Cl-free or Cl-rich aqueous fluids (Dfluid/melt) for 26 elements at a temperature of 1100C and pressures of 0.3 and 0.7 GPa using internally-heated pressure vessels. Our results reveal that high-field strength elements (HFSE), except Th, are hardly partitioned into aqueous fluids, regardless of their salinity and pressure conditions. In contrast, the partitioning of other elements varies depending on the fluid salinity. Dfluid/melt of large-ion lithophile elements (LILE) and U increases with salinity, whereas that of rare earth elements (REE) and Th decreases. These results predict that slab-derived aqueous fluids can evolve to become richer in LILE and U and poorer in HFSE and REE by separating melt components, which explains the LILE- and U-rich and HFSE- and REE-poor characteristics of subduction-zone magmas. This also explains the higher LILE/HFSE and LILE/REE ratios in frontal-arc basalts than in rear-arc basalts: frontal-arc basalts can be generated by the addition of aqueous fluids that sufficiently separate the melt components at shallower depths, whereas rear-arc basalts are generated by the addition of supercritical liquids or aqueous fluid that insufficiently separate the melt components at greater depths. Such separation of melt components from ascending slab-derived fluid can determine the geochemical signature and across-arc compositional variation of subduction-zone magmas.

We are grateful to Dr. Seiko Yamasaki, Dr. Akiko Tanaka, Dr. Rumi Sohrin, and Ms. Kiyo Yamanobe for helpful discussions and technical assistance. H.T. would like to thank Dr. Takeshi Kuritani for the useful discussions. Editorial handling by Dr. Hans Keppler and constructive review and fruitful comments by two anonymous reviewers and Dr. Hans Keppler are greatly appreciated.

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

The Ascent is a cyberpunk twin-stick Action-RPG shooter, being the debut release of indie game studio Neon Giant. The Ascent has an exclusivity deal with Microsoft, where it will be available on Xbox Game Pass for current Xbox consoles and PC. While gamers have been enjoying Neon Giant's first release, others playing the PC version through the Game Pass have noticed some absences.

The Ascent has incredibly polished graphics and textures, which are all enhanced through Ray Tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS. Ray tracing is a method of rendering graphics so that it replicates the look and behavior of light, while DLSS is an AI rendering technology that upscales images from low-resolution to high-resolution. DLSS in particular is exclusive to Nvidia's graphics cards which can work in tandem with ray tracing. Fans playing through The Ascent have noticed that these features are present in Steam's version, but not in the PC Game Pass version.

When playing the Game Pass version, players were met with the fact that this version didn't support Nvidia's DLSS technology or that the ray tracing was not working at all. With players noticing these missing features between the two versions, some took their questions to social media about why the two builds were different and why these features were not in the game. The developers were quick to respond to the fans, as they said they are addressing these issues in a patch.

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