While both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have been heavily promoted as true 4K consoles, capable of making 60 FPS experiences, yet another AAA title has recently arrived, which will be at a meager 1440p 30 FPS run. When it launched in 2019, Control was a revelation on a computer. Top-end Turing cards like the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti can deliver a 4K / 60s experience (with DLSS), coupled with one of the first complete hardware detection implementations. This game was supposed to give us a glimpse of what ninth-generation titles would look and play like.
And while Control is certainly impressive on a computer, the console outings raise a lot of questions. Much of it has to do with a single aspect of the game’s technical pipeline: hardware ray detection. On a computer, Control performed like a spell with jet detection, disabling an native 4K experience on a variety of hardware platforms.
And although the reflections of the rays and the occlusion of the environment were striking, RT was not a (pardon) game changer that justifies the performance hit. With RT down, Control was still a nice game, but there was not so much in terms of model poly counting, textures and materials, which was truly ‘next generation’.
And therein lies the problem. On current platforms, and even on top-end computers with the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3090, ray-tracing works, but only with deep performance. DLSS 2.0 illuminates it on NVIDIA’s latest graphics cards and delivers image quality that is objectively as good as or better than the original version. However, AMD has not yet announced their Super Resolution solution. This means that developers have only one way to get ray detection to work on the consoles: lowering the resolution, redirecting and reducing their ambitions regarding core quality of assets.
Radiation detection is incredibly burdensome and the current platform is simply not up to par without compromising elsewhere. While it’s bad enough that a ninth-generation “4K / 60 consoles” use AAA games at 1440p / 30 FPS or lower, the real problem is in terms of development ambitions.
When it comes to pure raster graphics, there is so much room for improvement. Watch the Unreal Engine Paris apartment demo, created without the help of ray tracing. Asset quality is incredible. The polygon count, even on casual details like bath towel hangers, is very high. Material quality is impeccable and stage lighting is accurate, even if it is ordinary old world lighting.
Indie horror game Visage delivers photorealistic imagery without tracing the streets, running at over 100 FPS at 4K on the GeForce RTX 3080. Developer SadSquare has focused on core quality using techniques such as photogrammetry to capture real objects with to recreate an extremely high fidelity.
In stark contrast, next-generation games like Control and The Medium (which drops to 900p in the X-Series) contain assets that are only slightly better than the eighth-generation standard. Characters, objects and animations do not look so much better than what we have seen in the last 7 years. While ray tracing naturally improves scenes in the game, it is clear that the core quality of assets has been repackaged to enable ray tracing.
If games are already dropping to 1440p / 30 and lower on the ninth-generation consoles due to jet tracking, it does not bode well for the future of ninth-gen asset quality. The deep performance hit of ray tracing makes it something of a choice or a choice: developers can possibly double or triple the quality of the asset and the complexity of the scene, or they can add reflective ray reflections while using eighth- no equivalent assets work.
Much of this probably has to do with the hype-ray trace received since it appeared with Turing maps in 2018, and the widespread misconception about how deep the impact of hybrid ray trace is.
Complete roadblocking – which we see in Quake II RTX and Minecraft RTX – is absolutely the future of video games, though at some point in the next two decades. ‘Hybrid radiation detection’, where some parts of the pipeline use RT, may provide somewhat better footage in specific use cases: hybrid RT means slightly better lighting and shadows, and significantly better reflections than current raster techniques.
But because beam detection is not used in all aspects of the delivery pipeline, it is not a panacea: it will not make low poly models better; it will not improve the destructibility of the environment, and (with the exception of reflective surfaces), it will not have a major impact on the quality of the material. To put it briefly, hybrid ray tracing does some things a little better than rasterization, but comes with a performance hit that in many cases does not justify the visual enhancement remotely.
As consumer audiences equate ray tracing with ‘good graphics’, developers are implementing ray-tracing shadows, reflections and AO to display next-generation images in mediocre asset-quality games. When developers try to do both, as with Cyberpunk 2077, performance is flat, regardless of platform.
But why does it matter? As the market continues to prioritize jet tracking, developers will continue to add expensive hybrid RT effects to games offered on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. This will result in a sub-native, 30 FPS experience. But it will also prevent developers from meaningfully improving the core asset quality, because they simply will not have the performance overhead, thanks to the effects detected by the rays. In contrast, the results are phenomenal when ninth-generation developers choose to prioritize assets over RT. The Demon’s Souls remake on PlayStation 5 stands head and shoulders above almost any title on the Sony console. Bluepoint prioritized assets over unnecessary RT effects and the results speak for themselves. Performance also makes the game with an original 4K / 30.
Will developers continue to add ray-tracing effects to games at the expense of other visual elements? It’s too early to say now. But if the cross-period gradually reaches an unraveling, we need to know soon enough.
Preorder Control: Ultimate Edition on Xbox Series X / S here on Amazon