Ray-Tracing? Physics? Open Zones?

[Rekh]

There will not be any ray tracing in the game until it gets updated to support either DX12 or Vulkan as DX11 can not do RT anything.

They are putting FSR1 in the game and not FSR2 and leaving out any frame gen tech so I'm pretty sure they didn't do a lot in terms of PC optimizations. Maybe they pulled a Warframe and rewrote their lightning engine which will go a long way in how the game looks and possibly even optimized it to be able to run on older consoles to a degree. Big picture though, I assume most people will be disappointed with how same-y the game will look besides the lighting. That said they could knock it out of the park with the texture of all the gear and make it really pop but they haven't showed any of that stuff off yet. Also the anti aliasing implementation better be good otherwise it will look like a temporal mess like other games that just throw TAA in and hope it works out.

Long story short, don't get your hopes up. Better grass, lighting, textures (maybe) and AA, that is pretty much all you are getting in the update.

Well stated; real polygon/mesh changes and overall graphical fidelity outside of character's faces won't be there. Let's hope AI can remesh the sausage fingers and blocky thighs in some future.