The Ascent on Xbox Game Pass will soon be getting a DLSS and ray-tracing fix after a feature-incomplete launch

Neon Giant's cyberpunk shooter, The Ascent, released recently to very positive reviews. The game's visuals were a particular highlight, a late-gen showcase for Unreal Engine 4. The Ascent's neon-drenched setting is ideal for enabling ray-traced effects like reflections.

The Steam version of the game features extensive ray-tracing options, alongside NVIDIA's DLSS upscaling. Unfortunately, the game's Xbox Game Pass version shipped with broken support, both for ray-tracing and DLSS - users needed to turn these off or run the game under DirectX 11 for reasonable performance. As a UWP app, The Ascent on Xbox Game Pass has a locked-down file structure, meaning that it isn't even possible to enable DLSS by copying over a DLL file from another game.

Thankfully, days after the issue was spotted, developer Neon Giant stated that it was aware of it and was working to patch the Game Pass version so that DLSS and ray-tracing work properly. It isn't clear when the patch is set to arrive. However, this means that Game Pass subscribers won't be stuck with a feature-incomplete version of The Ascent.

The Ascent looks best with ray-tracing enabled. Check out the GeForce RTX 3080 on Amazon here.