Tqaulity
Member
IGN's weekly "Next Gen Console Watch" this week discussed why there are so "few" ray tracing titles on consoles. Am I the only one who expected far less RT titles within the 1st year of the PS5 and Series X? Especially (as they point out in the video) considering the COVID impact and the extended cross gen phase (games still supporting PS4 and Xbox One). PS5 has over 20 RT enabled games and the Series X has over 15. By comparison, Nvidia's RTX only had ~5 RT titles released in it's first year of availability.
Furthermore, Ryan in particular seemed to indicate that Ray tracing was one of the most pushed features for the new consoles leading up to launch. That's not true. Both companies mentioned ray tracing support as a feature that was there for developers to take advantage of if they chose. But they hardly pushed it as the leading feature, especially Sony. Just go back and look at PS5's launch trailer video. Nowhere in there did they even mention ray tracing. Sony has been pretty consistent that their 3 primary features for PS5 were: Dualsense, SSD, and 3D audio (as they highlighted in that trailer). Microsoft pushed RT a bit more but even in their Xbox Series X optimized trailer, RT was literally only a 3s mention: Xbox Series X optimized trailer
Hmmm....where are all the Ray-Traced Games? They're right here! Some console highlights: Control, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, Resident Evil Village, DOOM Eternal, Spider Man (and Miles Morales), Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, The Medium and more.
Considering the considerable performance impact associated with RT and the fact that AMD RDNA2 is not nearly as performant as some Nvidia cards, I am frankly amazed we've seen this many RT releases on console to date. Once we finally get out of the cross gen phase, we're likely to see even more.
Furthermore, Ryan in particular seemed to indicate that Ray tracing was one of the most pushed features for the new consoles leading up to launch. That's not true. Both companies mentioned ray tracing support as a feature that was there for developers to take advantage of if they chose. But they hardly pushed it as the leading feature, especially Sony. Just go back and look at PS5's launch trailer video. Nowhere in there did they even mention ray tracing. Sony has been pretty consistent that their 3 primary features for PS5 were: Dualsense, SSD, and 3D audio (as they highlighted in that trailer). Microsoft pushed RT a bit more but even in their Xbox Series X optimized trailer, RT was literally only a 3s mention: Xbox Series X optimized trailer
Hmmm....where are all the Ray-Traced Games? They're right here! Some console highlights: Control, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, Resident Evil Village, DOOM Eternal, Spider Man (and Miles Morales), Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, The Medium and more.
Considering the considerable performance impact associated with RT and the fact that AMD RDNA2 is not nearly as performant as some Nvidia cards, I am frankly amazed we've seen this many RT releases on console to date. Once we finally get out of the cross gen phase, we're likely to see even more.