007: First Light is the next big ray-tracing title this year, following in the footsteps of Control, Cyberpunk 2077, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Alan Wake 2, and Resident Evil 9 among others.
Nvidia announced its partnership with IO Interactive to bring the best physics-based ray-tracing to the upcoming 007 title at GDC 2026 in San Francisco. This means gamers running 007: First Light on an RTX-capable gaming rig will see the game as the developers at IO Interactive intended.
Henrik Schlichter, Technical Director at IO Interactive, explained the partnership with Nvidia, “This has been a very, very good collaboration, where the aim was to raise to a much higher level where we can enable these awesome features like ray-tracing.” And the latest footage of 007: First Light released at GDC shows the clear advantage of using Nvidia’s path-traced lighting technology to create a more immersive world for the upcoming Bond game.
While the game is certainly still playable with traditional, rasterized lighting, enabling ray-tracing offers stronger, sharper shadows, better reflections, and an increased sense of realism. And that immersion is a key aspect of the game since much of the gameplay involves stealth missions. Though IO Interactive has also upgraded the gunplay mechanics to better fit the 007 franchise compared to the Hitman series.
The shadows and reflections an important part of 007: First Light, as it is a stealth action title, and ray-tracing plays into that in a big way. However, when it comes to enemy recognition and limited line of sight, path-tracing doesn’t play a strong role. Lead Product Manager, Daniel Ben-Noon confirms, “It’s something we’ve already thrown into the limited sight from the beginning… Stealth is still a huge part of the game, and it’s not an artifact of the path-tracing. They have implemented that enemies are able to see mirrors and other things.” And because it’s not based on path-tracing, that behavior will be consistent across platforms.
However, in some cases the RTX On version may appear to be brighter and lacking contrast especially for gamers who are used to the traditional rasterized style of “RTX OFF” lighting. Of course, spending more time with ray-tracing enabled does help you shake-off the familiarity of rasterized lighting, but the change can be jarring.
When asked whether that experience gap was a concern during development, Schlichter confirmed “Yes, it definitely is. But that is also the balance that we need to find between the raster and path-tracing. The high fidelity that you get from the path-tracing is not always- we need to make sure that there’s a proper scalable approach to how you can go from one look of the game to the absolute highest tier. And for that we need to make sure that the systems are sort of somewhat looking the same, and that’s also where the path-traced reference comes in.
”So we can show that those are in synch with each other as much as we can, but there are limitations to what we can do without involving the full addressing system for the lighting and physics in general.”
Thus, the non-RTX version of 007: First Light will still be very similar to the ray-traced version, so gamers on older or non-RTX friendly hardware won’t be missing out entirely. Though some textures, reflections, and shadows will be different due to the technical limitations of rasterized lighting. IO Interactive used the path-traced lighting as a map to help create the rasterized lighting. This way the game’s shadows are in the same place regardless of whether you play with ray-tracing enabled or not. Which is just a bit important for an immersive stealth action game.
“Make sure we have camera systems that can actually be the leverage to this cinematic feeling that we want games to have.”
While 007: First Light uses the same Glacier Engine as IO Interactive’s Hitman property, the game engine has gone through some changes to better suit a Bond title. While the Glacier Engine is already set up to handle globe-tracking missions, James Bond requires a more cinematic touch. “But we needed to enhance the cinematic effects of this, so we’ve done a lot of work creating the animation system that can give us this,” Ben-Noon explained. “Make sure we have camera systems that can actually be the leverage to this cinematic feeling that we want games to have.”
007: First Light tells the story of a young James Bond during his MI6 training. Gameplay blends stealth and action combat with various spy gadgets and, of course, an obligatory getaway car or two. It is not directly based on any of Ian Fleming’s novels or any of the Hollywood Films. 007: First Light is an original story drafted by IO Interactive for the game, and will take Bond all over the world. Confirmed locations for 007: Last Light include Iceland, Slovakia, Thailand, Mauritania, and London.
007: First Light will release on PC and console on May 27, 2026.
