Valve recently made an update to their digital card game Artifact. That isn't the big news here, what is the big news is that hidden within the files were a couple of references to RTX and real-time ray tracing. This marks the first time that any sort of ray tracing support was noticed in any of Valve's Source 2 files.
The mentions were first discovered by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik. Djundik noticed that the latest update for Artifact includes references to both "RTX" and "Raytracing shader."
This could, of course, not mean much at all. It could simply be someone working on Source 2 at Valve experimenting with new features that may not see the light of day for years or ever at all. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to include ray tracing in a collectible card game, but you just never know for sure. All we know is that something is going on behind the scenes with Source 2.
The speculation has already gone wild on the Internet. People are discussing everything from RTX versions of the popular Half-Life franchise to possibly being added to the Source 2 version of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
