The current generation consoles, and their ray tracing capability.

[DanielG123]

I'm not super knowledgeable about the nitty gritty side of video game technology, but it has always interested me in trying to understand the technology that goes into modern games, and especially the hardware that coincides with allowing for said tech to be more easily implemented. One of the biggest selling points this generation, as well as one of the most interesting technologies for me personally, is ray tracing. Microsoft, and Sony have both really pushed this technique in the initial marketing of their premium consoles, and how both the Xbox Series X and the PS5 were fully capable of achieving ray tracing.

However, while this is indeed the case, it seems that neither machine is really that great at it; in many cases, they appear to have to make considerable sacrifices for RT to be achieved. My question to the more knowledgeable people here on Era is: Why is that, exactly? What do the consoles lack that they would perhaps need to see better results in this area? I know that AMD generally isn't as good as Nvidia in regards to ray tracing, but why? Have they not put as much, I guess, "R&D" into it, or do their cards not have something that Nvidia ones do, and that translates to the consoles?

I guess I could have easily just researched this on my own, but there are a lot very smart and knowledgeable people here, and I am genuinely curious as to what y'all have to say. Teach me, I am your sponge!

 

[Raigor]

RT is expensive

PS5 and XSX are not that strong to support full-RT features

That's it.

 

[TronLight]

AFAIK, basically nVidia put a lot of research and time into their ray tracing hardware, and were the first to launch it. AMD was not working on any RT hardware, and they kind of had to whip up an answer quickly. Which didn't yield the best results, but it works. Kind of a band aid until they get better at it. Consoles ended up with the "lesser" solution and they are obviously stuck with it though. Also, nVidia has DLSS which just mitigates the performance cost of ray tracing almost entirely, which is huge. Even if their hardware was just as slow as AMD's, DLSS just fixes that.

 

[Deleted member 93062]

Both consoles are capable of ray tracing just like AMD GPUs are, they just aren't very good at it and not having something like DLSS just makes it worse. Games using Unreal can use Lumen which will be tailored made for consoles and they're thankfully trying to hit 60FPS with it. Also combined with TAAU, should be pretty solid. It won't be full ray tracing and upscaling as good as Nvidia cards have shown, but it'll definitely be a lot better than current lighting and reflection techniques.

Also I believe there will just be Pro consoles in a few years that will be marketed like RTX cards were in 2018. RTX ON/OFF type stuff. By then AMD should have competent ray tracing support with full acceleration and hopefully some form of image reconstruction that is better than FSR.

 

[ILikeFeet]

Nvidia has put in a lot for research into RT and thus, made their RT cores more robust in what they do, to take the load of the compute cores

that said, I think people underrate the RT capabilities of the consoles. it's just that best practices haven't been established for console RT yet. early showings show that RT can still be very well done

 

[Deleted member 16908]

Someone else can probably give a more detailed answer but the gist of it is that Nvidia's RTX GPUs have an entire section of the chip dedicated exclusively to ray-tracing acceleration and AI/machine learning. They're also on their second generation of hardware-accelerated RT GPUs, with their first having launched in 2018.

AMD, by contrast, only just got into the RT game with their RDNA 2 GPUs in late 2020. With RDNA2, each CU (compute unit) has a little bit of ray tracing acceleration capability built into it. This is a good start but pales in comparison to Nvidia's approach.

 

[elenarie]

The answer to this question from both customer and developer point of view is, you get what you pay for. 500 EUR machine released in 2020 with tech being R&D-ed months and years before that is not going to give you much more.

Let's check again next gen when devs have a lot higher incentive to abandon legacy rasterisation pipelines and transition to what I hope would be RT pipelines by default. I hope that is the default when whatever new hardware gets introduced then. Would be a shame if we are still not RT by default by then.

 

[Tora]

Nvidia has put in a lot for research into RT and thus, made their RT cores more robust in what they do, to take the load of the compute cores

that said, I think people underrate the RT capabilities of the consoles. it's just that best practices haven't been established for console RT yet. early showings show that RT can still be very well done

Click to shrink...

You always come in with sensible takes

 

[Xeonidus]

RT is very expensive. Having 4k, 60fps, RT, and high graphics details was just not a realistic expectation to have put of $500 dollar boxes. Still, developers should be able to squeeze more out of these boxes as time goes on. The matrix demo is a hint at that. But that can obviously only go so far.

Next gen should be better in this regard of course, but consoles by their very nature and design will always be behind high end gpus.

 

[nihilence]

I think they will get better at exploring and exploiting the hardware. It's still more of a checklist item during this cross gen period.

 

[Izzard]

In years to come I expect RT to improve, but these are relatively cheap machines so looking at PC on ultra settings and assuming it's gonna happen on console isn't realistic.

Also, as nice as it can be, the current "best looking game ever" doesn't use it.

 

[Gamer @ Heart]

As cross gen dies, and games are built around the limited RT abilities of these AMD chips, I think it will get alot better. Right now, they are essentially switches for shadows mostly, and very rarely reflections because they are fundamentally last gen games souped up. Metro Exodus provided GI, solid resolution and 60 fps by essentially rebuilding the entire lighting system which took time and dedication and was helped by having a basis in their efforts on the PC already.

But the give and take of framerate/resolution/RT will never go away because of how early these consoles shipped in AMDs RT venture.

 

[Yautja_Warrior]

For what PS5 and XSX cost, I think they have done a reasonable job balancing things when it comes to RT. You can't expect miracles when these consoles cost less than a top end GPU on it's own.

PC can obviously do RT better but you need much more expensive hardware to pull it off, and even then RT at 4k + 60fps isn't always a guarantee, at least not at max settings on all games.

 

[ILikeFeet]

You always come in with sensible takes

Click to shrink...

we have Ratchet and Clank and Spider-man with 60fps RT modes, GTA5 will come with it, and Metro Exodus pumping out 60fps ray traced global illumination

not to mention this crazy shit


all this and I'm surprised people still think RT will be underwhelming this generation. then again, we do this every gen. "new generation not living up to expectations?", "I'm very underwhelmed by new gen consoles", etc. and then comes the late generation that makes it hard to believe this is the same hardware. AMD's RT is "bad", but largely because Nvidia's is just better and (PC) people want their cake and eat it too

 

[Mahonay]

We're fortunate they can do as much ray tracing as they currently are. These machines were designed in the very early days of ray tracing GPUs.

Ray tracing is also extremely expensive performance wise and these consoles don't have anything like DLSS, which makes games on PC playable when you turn on a suite of ray tracing features.

Coming into this gen my expectations were extremely low for what would be offered ray tracing wise, so what the PS5 and XSX have done so far is actually above what I expected possible with the hardware.

UE5 is potentially going to open up some crazy possibilities on consoles, as we've now seen with the playable Matrix tech demo.

 

[Hernan532]

RT in PC is bad too as it is right now. And of course in PC is better,you are comparing a system that cost less than a single GPU

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Nvidia has put in a lot for research into RT and thus, made their RT cores more robust in what they do, to take the load of the compute cores

that said, I think people underrate the RT capabilities of the consoles. it's just that best practices haven't been established for console RT yet. early showings show that RT can still be very well done

Click to shrink...

This is closer to reality, yes. It's not that the consoles are bad, they just haven't truly been tested yet. When they are worked on solely, the results can be quite impressive, such as Ratchet & Clank. We may never know what the Series X is capable of on its own (I don't believe we'll ever see a sole exclusive for it), but I'm sure there will at least be a few titles that showcase much of what it can do.

If one wants the best ray-tracing has to offer, you'll have to jump on PC with a lot of us. Otherwise, the consoles will do just fine with what they have. It honestly shocks me that I don't hear more from people about Martha Is Dead (PC), as that game has some of the most targeted uses of raytracing yet, resulting in some pretty fabulous looking environments! Much better soft shadows, excellent (and not overly done) reflections, and believable GI!

Also, to the above poster saying raytracing is "overall bad" on PC, that's just not true. There are games with fantastic results despite some that don't take advantage of it properly, particularly if you have an RTX GPU. It is AMD who need to step their game up!

 

[Deleted member 93062]

RT in PC is bad too as it is right now. And of course in PC is better,you are comparing a system that cost less than a single GPU

Click to shrink...

It isn't though. At least for Nvidia GPUs. Especially not compared to consoles. There have been cases where consoles are using settings that are lower than the ones offered on PC. Many test have shown that consoles are around if not worse than a RTX 2060 when it comes to ray tracing performance. That's their entry level GPU from nearly 4 years ago. Ray tracing on PC, especially with DLSS, has been solid for a few years now.

 

[Firmus_Anguis]

Current-gen games fully built around it will be amazing.

No games have come close to maxing out these consoles.

 

[bes.gen]

nvidia basically running circles around amd on that front with addition of stuff like dlss.
and consoles are stuck with amd. (and a price conscious amd gpu at that)

 

[HeWhoWalks]

We're fortunate they can do as much ray tracing as they currently are. These machines were designed in the very early days of ray tracing GPUs.

Ray tracing is also extremely expensive performance wise and these consoles don't have anything like DLSS, which makes games on PC playable when you turn on a suite of ray tracing features.

Coming into this gen my expectations were extremely low for what would be offered ray tracing wise, so what the PS5 and XSX have done so far is actually above what I expected possible with the hardware.

UE5 is potentially going to open up some crazy possibilities on consoles, as we've now seen with the playable Matrix tech demo.

Click to shrink...

Actually if anything, Nanite + Lumen may prove that you don't even need raytracing much of the time. If you have the right lighting/materials/and shaders, results van be quite staggering!

 

[ILikeFeet]

Actually if anything, Nanite + Lumen may prove that you don't even need raytracing much of the time. If you have the right lighting/materials/and shaders, results van be quite staggering!

Click to shrink...

is that the demo by the Wolcen dev?

it's downloadable for anyone wanting to see what Nanite brings to the table

 

[HeWhoWalks]

is that the demo by the Wolcen dev?

it's downloadable for anyone wanting to see what Nanite brings to the table

Click to shrink...

Yep and it is glorious, especially if you can run it reasonably (yes, I'm blessed 😸 )

 

[TooBusyLookinGud]

RT in PC is bad too as it is right now. And of course in PC is better,you are comparing a system that cost less than a single GPU

Click to shrink...

Huh? I wasn't aware of this. Do you mind explaining your position?

 

[ILikeFeet]

Yep and it is glorious, especially if you can run it reasonably (yes, I'm blessed 😸 )

Click to shrink...

I hit 90fps with my 3060Ti. shame it was made with EA and not Preview. it would run much better with HW RT

 

[Tora]

we have Ratchet and Clank and Spider-man with 60fps RT modes, GTA5 will come with it, and Metro Exodus pumping out 60fps ray traced global illumination

not to mention this crazy shit


all this and I'm surprised people still think RT will be underwhelming this generation. then again, we do this every gen. "new generation not living up to expectations?", "I'm very underwhelmed by new gen consoles", etc. and then comes the late generation that makes it hard to believe this is the same hardware. AMD's RT is "bad", but largely because Nvidia's is just better and (PC) people want their cake and eat it too

Click to shrink...

Spot on. It's usually just a case of tools maturing and devs actually learning how to utilise hardware. Also takes a few years for an onslaught of titles to start coming out, which is why i'm excited the most for 2023 and beyond.

I remember when Uncharted 4 came out, one of the directors said that there was still more to extract from the PS4 and I didn't believe them - TLOU2 came out and showed how they managed to improve even further visually.

TechRadar | the technology experts

The latest technology news and reviews, covering computing, home entertainment systems, gadgets and more

www.technobuffalo.com

 

[jtb]

I think RT is way too expensive to ever be viable on current gen consoles. 4K is already too expensive for most games, and that's supposed to be the target resolution for these consoles.

 

[Bony Manifesto]

Huh? I wasn't aware of this. Do you mind explaining your position?

Click to shrink...

For me, it's that the performance hit frequently doesn't justify the visual improvement. That's partially down to patchy support from developers, but also down to GPUs not yet being as suited to it as they could be. It reminds me when SSAO was first a thing: nowadays, it's something you enable by default as it's cheap and has a transformative effect on visuals (though funnily enough, that's another thing that will ultimately be rendered obsolete with ray tracing), but on the first GPUs that supported it, it had a disproportionately large performance hit, and it was one of the first things you'd disable to increase your fps.

Edit: I think the tipping point for ray tracing adoption will be even more severe, because there's a big performance hit as soon as you enable any form of ray tracing, but every visual effect you use ray tracing for after that has a much smaller impact because the most expensive work has already been done.

 

[Jaded Alyx]

Microsoft, and Sony have both really pushed this technique in the initial marketing of their premium consoles, and how both the Xbox Series X and the PS5 were fully capable of achieving ray tracing.

Click to shrink...

And Series S!

 

[Dragonyeuw]

Being an absolute technical moron, I imagine developers will get better results as they gain more familiarity with the hardware.

 

[Jailer of Hope]

I haven't played too many games with RT support, but GotG was probably the first game where I played the RT mode and felt like it was worth the drawbacks. It changed my thoughts on RT practicality on consoles.

 

[modiz]

From my understanding, Ray Tracing performance in games is held back quite a bit by it essentially being "tacked on" in most games rather than built into the engine as a core feature, that is to say, it serves as additional render time on the current pipeline rather than building the render pipeline with Ray Tracing and saving costs under that assumption. In theory this should mean that once games get built under the assumption that they would use Ray Tracing, performance of said Ray Tracing techniques will grow better.

We can already see that with Metro Exodus and the new Matrix demo. Metro Exodus on next gen consoles uses RT for a bunch of different lighting techniques, more than any oher game on console. This came with an interesting impact, that the PC version of the enhanced version of Metro Exodus could only run a Ray Tracing supporting GPU, respectively consoles did not have an option to toggle RT off, it was built into the engine. meanwhile the Matrix demo uses an advanced version of Lumen that uses the hardware accelerated RT technology in the consoles to run the city with fully emissive lighting, especially when you use the experimential night time setting and all the cars and street lights get lit up with emissive lights, it ends up being an absolute massive technical showcase for the possibility for the hardware to be better utilized on consoles.

In short, it should get better over time.

 

[sirap]

It'll get better as devs find ways around the hardware limitations.

 

[DanielG123]

This is closer to reality, yes. It's not that the consoles are bad, they just haven't truly been tested yet. When they are worked on solely, the results can be quite impressive, such as Ratchet & Clank. We may never know what the Series X is capable of on its own (I don't believe we'll ever see a sole exclusive for it), but I'm sure there will at least be a few titles that showcase much of what it can do.

If one wants the best ray-tracing has to offer, you'll have to jump on PC with a lot of us. Otherwise, the consoles will do just fine with what they have. It honestly shocks me that I don't hear more from people about Martha Is Dead (PC), as that game has some of the most targeted uses of raytracing yet, resulting in some pretty fabulous looking environments! Much better soft shadows, excellent (and not overly done) reflections, and believable GI!

Also, to the above poster saying raytracing is "overall bad" on PC, that's just not true. There are games with fantastic results despite some that don't take advantage of it properly, particularly if you have an RTX GPU. It is AMD who need to step their game up!

Click to shrink...

I've never heard of Martha is Dead until now; thanks for sharing this, man, I'll have to check it out later!

Nvidia has put in a lot for research into RT and thus, made their RT cores more robust in what they do, to take the load of the compute cores

that said, I think people underrate the RT capabilities of the consoles. it's just that best practices haven't been established for console RT yet. early showings show that RT can still be very well done

Click to shrink...

I see. And things like Rift Apart, Miles Morales, and Metro Exodus Enhanced are pretty impressive on console for sure. So once developers really start to develop solely for the new machines, we should see RT take off more?

 

[HeWhoWalks]

I've never heard of Martha is Dead until now; thanks for sharing this, man, I'll have to check it out later!

Click to shrink...

You're welcome! 😊

 

[DanielG123]

Actually if anything, Nanite + Lumen may prove that you don't even need raytracing much of the time. If you have the right lighting/materials/and shaders, results van be quite staggering!

Click to shrink...

Would Nanite and Lumen be more efficient to use in a lot of scenarios? Sorry to ping you again lol.

 

[ILikeFeet]

Would Nanite and Lumen be more efficient to use in a lot of scenarios? Sorry to ping you again lol.

Click to shrink...

lumen is ray tracing. and nanite seems to always be useful for non-deformable objects. so yea, they'd be more efficient, though if you need more performance, you would ditch lumen (and virtual shadow maps, if you're using it)

 

[DanielG123]

lumen is ray tracing. and nanite seems to always be useful for non-deformable objects. so yea, they'd be more efficient, though if you need more performance, you would ditch lumen (and virtual shadow maps, if you're using it)

Click to shrink...

Ahh, gotcha. Thanks, I'm still not familiar with the different names for everything.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

Would Nanite and Lumen be more efficient to use in a lot of scenarios? Sorry to ping you again lol.

Click to shrink...

Lumen is a hybrid, more optimized version of raytracing (software raytracing). This enables it to be better adopted. Something like the RTX cards can take full advantage of it resulting in the stuff that I posted.

That said, because software raytracing has limitations, I'll always prefer the hardware based stuff, but with Lumen, you at least get a good enough taste of it.

 

[Hernan532]

Huh? I wasn't aware of this. Do you mind explaining your position?

Click to shrink...

I'm only talking about my current experience with my RTX 2080. Activating RT on any game capable means that you will resign locked fps at least in my experience. Maybe my expectations were high but it's almost impossible with an rtx 2080 setting RT on highest settings,1080p resolution and not get stutters or some kind of frame drops.
For example in Cyberpunk RT looks very good but for me is almost unplayable, i really prefer getting good fps without drops over RT.
And this happens to all games with rt. You would get 40fps instead of the 90 you get without RT enabled with a GPU with RT support. For me is bad.
Like i said this is my experience of course

 

[AfropunkNyc]

we have Ratchet and Clank and Spider-man with 60fps RT modes, GTA5 will come with it, and Metro Exodus pumping out 60fps ray traced global illumination

Click to shrink...

Did you notice what these games all have in common? minus Ratchet and Clank.

 

[HeWhoWalks]

I'm only talking about my current experience with my RTX 2080. Activating RT on any game capable means that you will resign locked fps at least in my experience. Maybe my expectations were high but it's almost impossible with an rtx 2080 setting RT on highest settings,1080p resolution and not get stutters or some kind of frame drops.
For example in Cyberpunk RT looks very good but for me is almost unplayable, i really prefer getting good fps without drops over RT.
And this happens to all games with rt. You would get 40fps instead of the 90 you get without RT enabled with a GPU with RT support. For me is bad.
Like i said this is my experience of course

Click to shrink...

With DLSS, that's not true either. The fps increases substantially. A game like Cyberpunk is a poor example anyway, as it is one of the most demanding games with/without raytracing. Yes, you may get some stutters, frame dips along the way, but that doesn't make the raytracing itself "bad". I got acceptable framerates in Metro Exodus EE, for example, with all bells/whistles on, in 1440p, even before DLSS is turned on.

 

[Hernan532]

With DLSS, that's not true either. The fps increases substantially. A game like Cyberpunk is a poor example anyway, as it is one of the most demanding games with/without raytracing. Yes, you may get some stutters, frame dips along the way, but that doesn't make the raytracing itself "bad". I got acceptable framerates in Metro Exodus EE, for example, with all bells/whistles on, in 1440p, even before DLSS is turned on.

Click to shrink...

I mean it has bad performance . It looks great of course, but i think that they needed more time, probably with a 3080 you are ok now, but i will wait the 40 series

 

[HeWhoWalks]

I mean it has bad performance . It looks great of course, but i think that they needed more time, probably with a 3080 you are ok now, but i will wait the 40 series

Click to shrink...

Again, that's one game. What about the other countless examples where performance isn't that bad? You said raytracing, in general, is bad.

 

[JigglesBunny]

They used AMD hardware, as consoles have for quite a while. AMD is not exactly at the forefront of RT performance.

Pretty straightforward.

 

[JaseC64]

RT was never a main feature but a welcomed inclusion. Glad Sony and MS did work with AMD to include even a smaller taste of it.

BTW RT is expensive on PC gaming. You need beefy ass GPUs for the "ideal" experience. Your $500 is not expected to bear out a $600+ GPU. (Notice I said GPU. You still need the whole shebang CPU, Ram, SSD etc)

Next gen, there should be better RT support with the whole AI scaling going on. At this point, we should be glad there's even this RT introduction. Sony and MS could have just not bothered with including it at all.

 

[Vidpixel]

All I know is that in a few years, games are gonna look nuts. It'll be fascinating to see how developers weave RT capabilities into their engines and how they'll push hardware limitations to their maximum capacity.

 

[HighspeedRefleX]

I assume they could implement RT more heavily by lowering the resolution. Honestly as long other types of reflections look impressive I Don't really think it's relevant. It remains transformative without a doubt so technically RT > other effects I guess.

 

[highlevelnovice]

RT was a feature added in later on in production. Especially in the case of PS5, if I recall correctly, it was a last minute addition. I fully expect a pro version of these consoles in 2024 along with "true" 120hz support through beefed up cpu clocks and GPUs that can support some proprietary version of DLSS that will allow better ray tracing support.

 

[elenarie]

is that the demo by the Wolcen dev?

it's downloadable for anyone wanting to see what Nanite brings to the table

Click to shrink...

This is all nice and fun, but try to scale it to a full game with actual game systems running.