While both the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X were heavily promoted as true 4K consoles, capable of 60 FPS experiences, yet another AAA title has recently arrived, which would run at a minimum of 1440p at 30 FPS. When it was released in 2019, Control was a revelation on PC. High-end Turing cards, such as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, could offer a 4K / 60 (with DLSS) experience, combined with one of the first complete hardware ray tracing implementations. This game was supposed to give us an idea of what ninth generation titles would look like and play.
And while Control is certainly impressive on the computer, the console outputs raise a lot of questions. It has a lot to do with one aspect of the game’s technical pipeline: hardware-accelerated ray tracing. On the PC, Control worked like a charm with the ray tracing turned off, showcasing a native 4K experience on a wide range of hardware platforms.
And while the reflections drawn by lightning and environmental occlusion were noticeable, enabling RT was not a game changer (sorry pun intended) that justified performance success. With RT off, Control was still a beautiful-looking game, but there wasn’t so much, in terms of counting patterns, textures, and materials, that was really “next-generation.”
And here lies the problem. On current-generation platforms, and even on high-end computers with the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090, ray tracing “works,” but only with profound performance success. DLSS 2.0 relieves it in the latest NVIDIA graphics cards, which offer an objectively as good or better image quality than the native rendering. AMD has not yet released its Super Resolution solution. This means that developers have only one way to make ray tracing work on consoles: drop resolution, frame rate, and reduce their ambitions in terms of basic asset quality.
Lightning tracking is incredibly burdensome and the current generation platforms just don’t live up to the task without compromising anywhere else. While it’s bad enough for a ninth-generation 4K / 60 console to have AAA games at 1440p / 30 FPS or less, the real problem is what the developers ’ambitions are.
There’s a lot of room for improvement, when it comes to pure fast graphics. Check out the Unreal Engine Paris apartment demo, created without the help of ray-tracing. The quality of the resources is amazing. The number of polygons, even in accessory details such as bath towel hangers, is extremely high. The quality of the material is impeccable and the stage lighting is accurate, even if it is an old global lighting.
Visage, an independent horror game, offers photorealistic images without ray tracing and, while running at more than 100 FPS at 4K on the GeForce RTX 3080. Developer SadSquare focused on the quality of core assets, using techniques such as photogrammetry to recreate real-world objects with extremely high fidelity.
By contrast, next-generation games, such as Control and The Medium (which drop to 900p in the X series), feature features that are only marginally better than the eighth-generation standard. The characters, objects and animations don’t look much better than what we’ve seen over the last 7 years. While the ray tracing obviously improves the scenes of the game, it is clear that the quality of the core assets was reduced to allow for the ray tracing.
If games are already dropping to 1440p / 30 on ninth-generation consoles due to ray tracing, things are not a good omen for the future of the quality of ninth-generation assets. Successful deep ray tracing performance makes it an option: developers could double or triple the quality of resources and the complexity of the scene, or they could add ray-traced reflections while working with equivalent eighth-generation resources. .
Probably a lot of this has to do with the advertising ray tracing received since it premiered with the Turing cards in 2018 and with the widespread misunderstanding of how important the impact of the hybrid ray tracing is.
The full course of the road (what we see in Quake II RTX and Minecraft RTX) is absolutely the future of video game graphics, albeit at some point in the next two decades. The “hybrid ray tracing”, where some parts of the rendering pipe use RT, may offer slightly better visuals, in specific use cases: Hybrid RT means slightly better lighting and shadows and significantly better reflections than current raster techniques.
But since the ray tracing is not used in all aspects of the rendering pipe, it is not a panacea: it will not magically improve low-poly models; it will not improve environmental destructibility and (except for reflective surfaces), it will not have a significant impact on the quality of the material. Simply put, hybrid ray tracing does some things a little better than rasterization, but it includes performance success that, in many cases, doesn’t remotely justify visual improvement.
Because consumer audiences equate ray tracing with “good graphics,” developers implement ray-traced shadows, reflections, and AOs to promote next-generation images in games with mediocre asset quality. When developers try to do both, as with Cyberpunk 2077, the performance lines flat, regardless of platform.
But why does that matter? If the market continues to prioritize ray tracing, developers will continue to add expensive hybrid RT effects to games featured on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. This will result in sub-native 30 FPS experiences. But it will also prevent developers from significantly improving the quality of core assets, as they will simply not have the overall performance, thanks to these ray tracing effects. In contrast, when ninth-generation developers choose to prioritize assets over RT, the results are phenomenal. The remake of Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 5 is on the head and shoulders above any lightning-fast title on Sony’s console. Bluepoint prioritizes assets over unnecessary RT effects and the results speak for themselves. Performance also does with the game in a native 4K / 30.
Will developers continue to add ray tracking effects to games at the expense of other visuals? Now it’s too early to tell. But with the growth of the intergenerational period, we should know soon enough.
Order Control: Final Edition in the Xbox X / S Series here on Amazon