While both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have been heavily promoted as true 4K consoles, capable of 60 FPS experiences, yet another AAA title has arrived recently, running at a meager 1440p 30 FPS. When it launched in 2019, Control was a revelation on PC. Top Turing cards, such as the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, could provide a 4K / 60 (with DLSS) experience, paired with one of the first complete implementations of ray-tracing hardware. This game was supposed to give us a look at what the ninth generation titles would look like and how they would play.
And while the Control is definitely impressive on the PC, the outputs on the console raise a lot of questions. Many of these are related to only one aspect of the game’s technical pipeline: hardware-accelerated ray tracking. On the computer, Control functioned like a charm with ray-tracing turned off, revealing a native 4K experience on a wide range of hardware platforms.
And, although the reflections drawn by the rays and the environmental occlusion were visible, the activation of RT was not a game changer (forgive the pun) that justified the performance. With RT off, Control was still a nice looking game, but there wasn’t that much in terms of the poly-counting pattern, textures and materials that would really be “next generation”.
And here’s the problem. On current generation platforms and even state-of-the-art computers with GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090, ray-tracing “works”, but only with deep performance. DLSS 2.0 attenuates this on the latest NVIDIA graphics cards, providing image quality that is objectively as good or better than native playback. However, AMD has not yet released the Super Resolution solution. This means that developers have only one way to make ray-tracing work on consoles: low resolution, framerate and reduced ambitions in terms of the quality of core assets.
Ray-tracing is extremely impressive, and the current generation platforms are simply not up to the task, without compromises elsewhere. While it’s bad enough that a new “generation of 4K / 60 consoles” runs AAA games at 1440p / 30 FPS or less, the real problem is in terms of developer ambitions.
There is so much room for improvement in terms of pure raster graphics. Take a look at the demo of the Unreal Engine Paris apartment, created without the help of ray-tracing. The quality of the assets is incredible. The number of the polygon, even on accidental details, such as bath towel hangers, is extremely high. The quality of the material is impeccable, and the lighting of the scenes is accurate, even if it is an old global lighting.
Visage, an independent horror game, delivers photorealistic images without tracking rays, and while running at over 100 FPS at 4K on GeForce RTX 3080. The SadSquare developer focused on the quality of core assets, using techniques such as photogrammetry to recreate objects from the real world with extremely high fidelity.
In stark contrast, state-of-the-art games like Control and The Medium (which drops to 900p on the X series) feature elements 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 in the last 7 years. While ray-tracing obviously improves the scenes in the game, it is obvious that the quality of the core assets has been reduced to allow ray-tracing.
If games are already dropping to 1440p / 30 and less on next-generation consoles due to ray-tracing, things do not bode well for the future of next-generation asset quality. The profound blow of ray-tracing performance makes it one of the choices: developers could double or triple the asset quality and complexity of the scene or add ray-traced reflections, while working with eighth-generation equivalent assets.
Many of these are probably related to tracking the hype rays received since it debuted with Turing cards in 2018 and the widespread misunderstanding of how profound the impact of hybrid ray tracing is.
Complete road tracking – 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. “Hybrid beam tracking”, in which parts of the playback pipe use RT, can provide somewhat better images in specific use cases: Hybrid RT means slightly better lighting and shadows and significantly better reflections than current raster techniques.
But because ray tracing is not used in all aspects of the playback pipe, it is not a panacea: it will not make low-poly models magically better; it will not improve the destructibility of the environment and (except for reflective surfaces), it will not have a major impact on the quality of the material. To summarize, hybrid ray-tracing does some things a little better than rasterization, but it comes with a performance hit that, in many cases, doesn’t justify visual enhancement remotely.
Because consumer audiences equate ray tracing with “good graphics,” developers are implementing shadow-drawn shadows, reflections, and AOs to promote state-of-the-art imagery in games with mediocre asset quality. When developers try to do both, as in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, linear performance, regardless of platform.
Why does it matter, though? 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 30 FPS experiences. But it will also prevent developers from significantly improving the quality of core assets, as they will simply not have overall performance due to those ray-like effects. In contrast, when ninth-generation developers choose to prioritize assets over RT, the results are phenomenal. The Demon’s Souls remake on the PlayStation 5 is above any ray-drawn title on the Sony console. Bluepoint has given priority to assets over unnecessary RT effects, and the results speak for themselves. Performance also happens with the game running at a native 4K / 30.
Will developers continue to add ray effects to games at the expense of other visuals? Now it’s too early to tell. But once the cross-gender period gradually reaches a conclusion, we should know soon enough.
Preorder Control: Ultimate Edition on Xbox Series X / S here on Amazon