While the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X were heavily promoted as true 4K consoles, capable of 60 FPS experiences, yet another AAA title recently arrived, set to run at a mere 1440p 30 FPS. When it was released in 2019, Control was a revelation on the PC. Cutting-edge Turing cards, such as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, can offer a 4K / 60 experience (with DLSS), combined with one of the first complete hardware radius tracking implementations. This game should give us an idea of what the ninth generation titles would look like and play.
And while the Control is certainly impressive on the PC, the console outputs raise many questions. Much of this has to do with a single aspect of the game’s technical pipeline: hardware-accelerated ray tracing. On the PC, Control worked perfectly with ray-tracing disabled, providing a native 4K experience on a variety of hardware platforms.
And although the reflections traced by rays and the occlusion of the environment were perceptible, enabling RT was not a (forgive the pun) a game changer that justified the success of performance. With RT disabled, Control was still a good looking game, but there wasn’t much, in terms of counting models, textures and materials, that it was really “next generation”.
And therein lies the problem. On current generation platforms and even high-end PCs with GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090, lightning tracking “works”, but only with a profound impact on performance. DLSS 2.0 alleviates this on the latest NVIDIA graphics cards, offering image quality that is objectively as good or better than native rendering. AMD, however, has not yet released its Super Resolution solution. This means that developers have only one way to make ray-tracing work on consoles: to reduce resolution, frame rate and to reduce their ambitions in terms of quality of essential assets.
Lightning tracking is incredibly stressful and current generation platforms simply are not up to the task without concessions elsewhere. While it is bad enough that a ninth generation “4K / 60 console” runs AAA games at 1440p / 30 FPS or less, the real problem lies in terms of the developer’s ambitions.
There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to purely raster graphics. Take a look at the demonstration of the Unreal Engine Paris apartment, created without the help of ray-tracing. The quality of the assets is incredible. Polygon counts, even in incidental details, such as bath towel hangers, are extremely high. The quality of the material is impeccable and the lighting of the scene is accurate, even if it is an old global lighting.
The indie horror game Visage offers photorealistic visuals without a ray trace and when running at over 100 FPS at 4K on the GeForce RTX 3080. The developer SadSquare focused on the quality of the main assets, using techniques such as photogrammetry to recreate real-world objects with fidelity extremely high.
In contrast, next generation games like Control and The Medium (which drops to 900p in the X Series), have features that are only slightly better than the eighth generation standard. Characters, objects and animations don’t look much better than what we’ve seen for the past 7 years. Although ray-tracing obviously improves the scenes in the game, it is clear that the quality of the main asset has been reduced to allow ray-tracing.
If games are already dropping to 1440p / 30 or less on ninth generation consoles because of ray-tracing, things are not a good omen for the future of ninth generation asset quality. The profound performance impact of ray tracing makes it a choice or either: developers can double or triple the quality of assets and the complexity of the scene, or they can add ray-traced reflections while working with equivalent eighth-generation assets.
Much of this probably has to do with the ray-tracing hype received since it debuted with Turing cards in 2018, and the widespread misunderstanding of how deep the impact of hybrid ray-tracing is.
Full path layout – what we see in Quake II RTX and Minecraft RTX – is absolutely the future of video game graphics, although at some point in the next two decades. “Hybrid ray tracing”, where some parts of the rendering pipeline use RT, can 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 ray-tracing is not used in all aspects of the rendering pipeline, it is not a panacea: it will not make low-poly models magically better; it will not improve environmental destructibility and (with the exception of reflective surfaces), it will not have a major impact on the quality of the material. In short, hybrid ray tracing does some things a little better than rasterization, but comes with a performance impact that, in many cases, does not remotely justify visual improvement.
As the consumer audience equates ray tracing to “good graphics”, developers implement ray-traced shadows, reflections and AO to promote next generation visuals in games with mediocre asset quality. When developers try to do both, as in Cyberpunk 2077, performance stabilizes, regardless of the platform.
But why does it matter? If the market continues to prioritize ray-tracing, developers will continue to add expensive hybrid RT effects to games that come on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. This will result in subnative 30 FPS experiences. But it will also prevent developers from significantly improving the quality of key assets, as they simply won’t have performance overhead, thanks to these streaked-ray effects. In contrast, when ninth-generation developers choose to prioritize assets over RT, the results are phenomenal. The remake of Demon’s Souls for PlayStation 5 is far above any lightning streak title on the Sony console. Bluepoint prioritized assets over unnecessary RT effects and the results speak for themselves. Performance too, with the game running at 4K / 30 natives.
Will developers continue to add ray-traced effects to games at the expense of other visual elements? It is too early to say now. But with the cross-gen period gradually coming to an end, we should know soon.
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