• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

The lack of ray-traced flagship games is baffling

I'm not talking about large Triple-A productions here, but about older games in a new raytracing guise, as they exist on the PC (Quake 2, Half-Life, Portal etc.).

Microsoft in particular could have brought Minecraft with ray tracing to Series S/X a long time ago. This game would certainly also be technically feasible on the Series S.

How come Sony and Microsoft are so reticent about it? It should be a relatively easy task to "raytrace" a smaller game from the PS1/2 or Xbox Era. This would be the ideal advertisement for a "Next Gen" console.

Some showcase videos: Quake 2 RTX, Minecraft RTX, Half-Life RTX

WaqDX7W.gif
 
Last edited:

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Only one company managed to do it on acceptable terms (60FPS) so far, I would bet they will 2nd, 3rd, 4th as well. The engine engineering is sadly pretty much dead, that's why you seeing this decline, it is no wonder that companies doing their custom solution achieve better results than your run of the mill 100(th) Unreal 4.5 game
 
Minecraft RTX is the only time I have ever been really impressed with ray tracing. It works well with that style and really transforms the look. For other games, traditional tricks work great at a much cheaper cost.
Eh it comes down to fidelity to me. The accuracy of rendering boost from using ray traced effects instead of screenspace or basic raster tricks makes a huge difference in making a game look a lot more stable. Seeing ambient occlusion shadows pop into existence when you move around when they should be there all the time really kills the illusion for me. With RT AO the shadowing looks flawless all the time even if the object is offscreen. Everything just takes on this super HD look from it and I can't wait to see where we go in the future with this technology. It's the endgame goal for realtime graphics and we're getting closer.
 

Xdrive05

Member
We have a AAA ray tracing game already in Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition. And yes, haters, ray tracing done right is a massively meaningful change to the presentation. RTGI in particular is important, as ME:EE shows.

Unreal Engine 5 will be the "make or break" with ray tracing for this generation, as it has a robust software implementation of Lumen that the consoles can run at 60fps (even Series S!), example: Fortnight Chapter 4, or hardware based version at 30fps on consoles, example: Matrix demo. And it looks jaw dropping.

But it's been a bummer that the coolest RTX-ified games on PC are mostly not available on consoles that really should be able to run them, like Minecraft RTX, Quake 1 & 2 RTX, Half-Life RTX, etc.
 
Last edited:

flying_sq

Member
You won't see any until consoles can do it well. Pretty sure a lot of developers don't want to waste time and effort for something that can't be implemented well on a huge portion of the market. It sucks, but its way too expensive device resource wise and monetary cost wise for hardware capable of doing it well. Maybe next gen consoles if they have at least 4090 levels of gpu power. The only thing that I could see maybe doing it, is Crysis 4, if they said screw the consoles and just focused on a PC god tier launch like they did with the original. That won't happen though because it probably wouldn't be profitable and everyone would complain that it runs poorly or that they can't max out the settings.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Metro exodus is fully RT on consoles... like the only game.
IMO RT is a bit overrated. It is the future obviously and looks great but raster techniques got so far at cheating it, I really don't mind it.
Look at uncharted 4 or tlou2? Looks better than any real time RT because it is all baked in + some dynamic stuff. sure, time of day will not change and it's cheating but still. The result is what matters
 
RT on Console is coming with the next generation machines.
PS5 and SX are capable, but doesn't habe the horsepower to deliver a complete AAA game in 4k 60fps.

And I know there will be a big shitstorm on a game with 1080p 30fps with good RT implementation.

So, we didn't see anithing relevant in this case.
 

sachos

Member
Its disappointing that the console with the better RT capabilities still haven't gotten a nice showcase from a first party. I think Sony has been doing fine with both Spidy games and Ratchet. From 3rd parties Metro and Matrix Demo perfectly showcase the power of RTGI and that it's possible on these machines.

We will have to wait for more devs to start moving their engines to a full RTGI solution like the one from UE5 or Metro engine, and for those of you here saying "raster techniques are good enough at faking it" you are not taking into account that if you want games to evolve and have more dynamic worlds and still keep looking better and better good then at some point you will need RTGI. You also are forgeting that its a huge pain in the ass for devs to fake all those lights, RT takes a huge load off of their shoulders, just switch the light on and you are good to go.

And yeah OP, im expecting more pathtraceds remasters moving forward for sure but i think we will have to wait for next gen for that to fully embrace them.
 
Last edited:
Ray tracing is too demanding for even PC in games like that and you want consoles to play them too?

1. Consoles use AMD and AMD can't match Nvidia when it comes to RT
2. I had to upgrade to an RTX 4080 to play Portal 2 with RTX. For the price I paid for my GPU alone I could have bought two PS5s and a Series S.

These current gen consoles are far too weak to run anything beyond some basic RT shadows/reflections never mind a full ray traced game even if that game is 10+ years old.
 
Last edited:

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Bro, I'm still waiting for ND to patch 4k 60fps into vanilla Uncharted 4/Lost Legacy. Baby steps.
They patched in 40fps mode for 4k. That's the best there will be.
Now if uc4 was ray traced, it would be a huge waste of resources. As it is now, everything is nicely hybrid baked and it looks great.
If it was ray traced, it would look worse (because bake quality is of very high, unachievable realtime rt) and run much worse.
Baking in is sometimes a very good idea.
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
AMD sucks for raytracing and even then no one's chomping at the bit to play older raytraced games on console, that's a PC thing because we're graphics whores and need justifications for buying our absurdly expensive hardware
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
I love the RT mode in Hogwarts tbf especially inside the castle
RT mode is shite in hogwarts. The only thing it adds in reflections on some floors while drastically reducing resolution, lod and grass rendering distance.
Balanced and Quality modes are so much better.

RT mode is just performance mode visually but with SOME reflections and 30fps.
 

anthony2690

Banned
I don't think the majority care for ray tracing.

& The casual audience certainly can't tell the difference between ray tracing and good SSR.

It was literally a buzz word that you would see people throw out on twitter.

The best thing about this generation has been super fast load times & 60fps games, I don't think I could go back, as it's been a blessing.
 

TheGrat1

Member
They patched in 40fps mode for 4k. That's the best there will be.
Now if uc4 was ray traced, it would be a huge waste of resources. As it is now, everything is nicely hybrid baked and it looks great.
If it was ray traced, it would look worse (because bake quality is of very high, unachievable realtime rt) and run much worse.
Baking in is sometimes a very good idea.
I am not talking about the Legacy of Thieves collection, I am talking the OG releases with the multiplayer and everything. As far as I can tell (just searched) they are still 30 fps on PS5. Which is ridiculous considering so many other games have gotten patches. Bloodborne and The Last Guardian need it too. Sony should be able to just put BluePoint on it and knock these out in a couple of months, tops.
 
Last edited:

Crayon

Member
We've been at it for 5 years and the development of it has been disappointingly slow. It's the future, but it's the future.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
I am not talking about the Legacy of Thieves collection, I am talking the OG releases with the multiplayer and everything. As far as I can tell (just searched) they are still 30 fps on PS%. Which is ridiculous considering so many otther games have gotten patches. Bloodborne and The Last Guardian need it too. Sony should be able to just put BluePoint on it and knock these out in a couple of months, tops.
original release getting 60fps patch would be ideal as there are some visual issues with legacy collection.
Not gonna happen
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Ftfy

More seriously though, RT tanks hard on pc gaming, taking fps from games.

Imagine rt on consoles, you would have to sacrifice alot for having stå le 30 fps.
Well, the current RT implementation is invented by nvidia really. It was to market 20xx cards.
I know it goes to early 90s but not like that
 

Bojji

Member
Insomniac has the best RT on consoles right now. Both spider man and ratchet are also 60 titles with ray tracing, there is nothing that is even close on consoles to them in terms of how good it looks and performs. Metro is second most impressive thing out there.

But yeah, RT will mostly be gimmick this gen.
 

DaGwaphics

Member
You will get next Gen rt when you start getting next Gen games. So far the next Gen only games are basically last gen games that didn’t bother shipping on last Gen consoles or attempted to do anything even remotely ambitious.

The UE5 games and other engines using GI will be the next frontier. It will be a long time before path tracing makes it out of the marble demo and into the primary modes of games.
 

Spyxos

Gold Member
I'm not talking about large Triple-A productions here, but about older games in a new raytracing guise, as they exist on the PC (Quake 2, Half-Life, Portal etc.).

Microsoft in particular could have brought Minecraft with ray tracing to Series S/X a long time ago. This game would certainly also be technically feasible on the Series S.

How come Sony and Microsoft are so reticent about it? It should be a relatively easy task to "raytrace" a smaller game from the PS1/2 or Xbox Era. This would be the ideal advertisement for a "Next Gen" console.

Some showcase videos: Quake 2 RTX, Minecraft RTX, Half-Life RTX

WaqDX7W.gif
The consoles aren't very good at it, and most games would probably have 30 fps lock.
 

Portugeezer

Member
It's very taxing in performance, for what usually - on consoles - just gives you better reflections.

Would rather devs fake it for better performance or to use resources on other things.

There will be a handful of games over the generation which will push the consoles RT limits, I'm sure, but not many.
 
RTX is fairly new, and sorry OP you can't have shit for 500.
Something like Minecraft should really be doable though. Even Metro Exodus manages ray tracing @ 60 fps.

In addition, a path tracing version of Minecraft was even shown on the Series X at the time.
 
Top Bottom