For the record, this isn’t a magical solution that will allow you to run Ray Tracing on a pregnancy test;
But this will help using Ray Tracing on systems that are powerful enough to run War Thunder on higher settings, but on which Ray Tracing still has too big of an impact in performance to be practical.
Anti-Aliasing: FSR (improves performance and is the best looking too.)
Upscaling Mode: Quality (impact in performance is significant enough while affecting visual quality the least among the upscaling options).
EDIT: DLSS works too; improves performance by a smaller degree, but looks much better, in my opinion!
“Hold on, but Upscaling is old news! I just don’t like it because it makes the game look too blurry!”
…and that’s where I found the solution! Set “TPS Sharpness” to 50% on “Post-FX settings” and the additional sharpness of the filter will make up for the blurriness of the upscaling for the most part.
Here’s a visuals and performance comparison:
1- Native Resulution, no Ray Tracing: 130 FPS (110 on match).
2- Native Resolution, Ray Tracing: 80 FPS (60 on match).
3- Upscaling Mode- Quality, Ray Tracing, TPS Sharpness 50%: 115 FPS (95 on match).
For quick side-by-side comparison, press on the images and use the arrow keys to switch them quickly.
As you can see, the game looks practically as good with the Upscaling+Sharpness trick as it does on Native resolution; and, while Ray Tracing still impacts performance, the impact is much lower than it would be without the trick.
Sure, the game does not look as nearly sharp as it does on Native resolution; but I believe the improvement in shadows, lighting and ambience is definitely worth it!
I hope this helps somebody! I, for one, can and will finally use Ray Tracing thanks to this trick.
REGARDING PERFORMANCE, IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL NOTE!
The “Terrain Displacement Quality” setting is broken- the highest value causes EXTREME FPS drops. Make sure to lower it 1-2 steps to prevent these from happening. It is a known issue and many players have already found this solution. I was getting FPS drops to as low as 25-30 FPS before finally fixing it by changing this setting!