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- 1 Oct 2009
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- Norwich, UK
This would be nice, but I sort of suspect it's not going to be true of the mainstream games. The consoles will technically support it in the sense the APIs and codepaths for doing it be there to use, but performance looks like it could be a limitation for visual effects. The PS5 system spec deep dive video had me less than convinced.
I think the best we can hope for is that consoles devs do implement ray tracing but they use aggressive optimization to get it playable. We've seen what looks like ray traced reflections in GT7 but that probably use 1/2 or 1/4 resolution and checkerboard that up to high def. And Ratchet and Clank straight up just excluding geometry and effects from being reflected by rays and the lack of any kind of diffusion of reflected geometry. Same goes for denoising of ray traced outputs, that looks to be missing in some areas as well leading to grainy shadows and lighting. As long as the PC version of the game has tweaks to remove these optimizations, we might get the best of both worlds. But devs aren't well known for their attention to the PC variant of multi-platform games, they quite often just don't care, or cannot justify the cost of time to implement specific tweaks for PC.
There's also the other problem that consoles are behind in terms of frame rate and screen resolution, they're still very much struggling to make that leap from 30fps to 60fps, and from 1080p to 4k and it's far easier to just spend a lot of the additional power on those free wins in terms of image quality rather than go the route of very expensive visual features. I guess time will tell.
