War Thunder adds stealth tech, ray tracing and graphics upgrades in the Firebirds update

Every time a new War Thunder update comes out, I think to myself: I'm finally going to progress a bit more into the aircraft research and then get side-tracked by tanks. But now, with stealth added in the Firebirds update, I might just have to sink some more hours in.

An exciting addition is the F-117A (Squadron Vehicle) which brings in a brand new stealth capability to the game. The developers note this craft has a "lower IR and radio signature". There's also multiple other aircraft including the F-15E, Su-34, Tornado GR.4 and Mirage 2000 RMV. There's also multiple new helicopters and new tanks.

But there's a lot more to this update as they've added in AMD FSR 3.1, DLAA, XeSS, TSR, Direct3D 12 (beta) and Ray Tracing (beta) with an overhaul to the graphics settings menu. They say they're looking at adding frame generation for a future update too. There's also some small reworks to multiple locations, but the "Abandoned Factory" got a huge upgrade visually and looks awesome.

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While it has Native Linux support with Vulkan, it looks like AMD FSR, XeSS and Ray Tracing are all currently only available via DirectX 12 - so you'll need to run War Thunder with Proton to see any of that. I'm hoping they continue to work on their Vulkan renderer too.

See a lot more about the update on the Steam announcement.