While both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X were heavily promoted as true 4K consoles, capable of 60 FPS experiences, another AAA title recently arrived, which will run at a meager 1440p 30 FPS. When it launched in 2019, Control was a revelation on PC. Top-end Turing cards such as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti can provide a 4K / 60 experience (with DLSS), combined with one of the first full implementations of hardware ray tracing. This game was supposed to give us an idea of what ninth generation titles would look and play like.
And while Control is certainly impressive on PC, its console outings raise a lot of questions. Much of that has to do with a single aspect of the game’s technical pipeline: hardware-accelerated ray tracing. On PC, Control worked like a charm with ray tracing turned off, providing a native 4K experience across a range of hardware platforms.
And while the ray-traced reflections and ambient occlusion were noticeable, turning on RT wasn’t a (pun excuse) game changer that justified the performance hit. With RT out, Control was still a nice game, but there wasn’t that much, in terms of number of poly-count models, textures and materials, that was really next-gen.
And therein lies the problem. On current-generation platforms, and even on top-end PCs with the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090, ray tracing “works,” but only with a big performance boost. DLSS 2.0 alleviates this on the latest NVIDIA graphics cards and delivers an image quality that is objectively as good as or better than native rendering. However, AMD has yet to release their Super Resolution solution. This means developers have only one way to get ray tracing to work on consoles: lower resolution, lower frame rate and scale back their core asset quality ambitions.
Ray tracing is incredibly taxing, and current-generation platforms just aren’t up to the task without compromising elsewhere. While it’s bad enough for a ninth generation of “4K / 60 consoles” to run AAA games at 1440p / 30 FPS or lower, the real problem lies in terms of developer ambitions.
There is so much room to improve as far as pure raster images are concerned. Watch the Unreal Engine Paris apartment demo, made without the help of ray tracing. The quality of the assets is incredible. The number of polygons, even on incidental details such as towel hangers, is extremely high. The material quality is impeccable and the scene lighting is accurate even if it’s just old global lighting.
Indie horror game Visage delivers photo-realistic visuals without ray tracing, and while running at over 100 FPS at 4K on the GeForce RTX 3080. Developer SadSquare focused on the quality of core assets, using techniques such as photogrammetry to measure real-world objects with extremely high fidelity.
In stark contrast, next-gen games like Control and The Medium (which drops to 900p on the Series X) contain assets only marginally better than the eighth-gen standard. Characters, objects and animations don’t look much better than what we’ve seen over the past 7 years. While ray tracing clearly improves in-game scenes, it is clear that the quality of the core assets has been scaled back to allow ray tracing.
If games already drop to 1440p / 30 and below on ninth-generation consoles due to ray tracing, things don’t bode well for the future of ninth-generation asset quality. The sweeping performance hit of ray tracing makes it something of an either-or-choice: developers can potentially double or triple the quality of assets and the complexity of the scene, or they can add ray-traced reflections while working with eighth- gene equivalent agents.
Much of this is likely to do with the hype ray tracing has received since it debuted with Turing cards in 2018, and a widespread misunderstanding of how profound the impact of hybrid ray tracing is.
Full path tracing – what we’re seeing in Quake II RTX and Minecraft RTX – is definitely the future of graphics video games, albeit sometime in the next two decades. “Hybrid ray tracing,” where some parts of the render pipeline use RT, can provide slightly better visuals in specific use cases: Hybrid RT means slightly better lighting and shadows and significantly better reflections than current raster techniques.
But because ray tracing isn’t used in all aspects of the rendering pipeline, it’s not a panacea: it doesn’t magically make low-poly models better; it will not improve environmental destructibility and (with the exception of reflective surfaces) it will not significantly affect material quality. In short, hybrid ray tracing does some things a bit better than rasterizing, but comes with a performance hit that in many cases doesn’t justify the visual improvement in the slightest.
Because the consumer audience equates ray tracing with “good graphics,” developers are implementing ray-traced shadows, reflections, and AO to promote next-generation visuals in mediocre asset quality games. When developers try to do both things, as with Cyberpunk 2077, flatlines perform regardless of platform.
But why does this matter? If the market continues to prioritize ray tracing, developers will continue to add expensive hybrid RT effects to games delivered on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. This will result in sub-native experiences of 30 FPS. But it also prevents developers from meaningfully improving the quality of core assets because, thanks to those ray-traced effects, they simply don’t have the performance. When ninth generation developers choose to prioritize assets over RT, the results are phenomenal. The remake of the Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 5 is head and shoulders above just about any ray traced title on Sony’s console. Bluepoint prioritizes assets over unnecessary RT securities and the results speak for themselves. Performance does that too with the game running on a native 4K / 30.
Will developers continue to add ray-traced effects to games at the expense of other visuals? It is too early to tell now. But with the cross-gene period gradually reaching a denouement, we should know soon enough.
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