News Far Cry 6 Proves Consoles Aren't Powerful Enough for Ray Tracing

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The global illumination used in the original Metro Exodus also only mattered in select scenes, and RT reflections that are only visible on a few surfaces also don't make a huge difference in how a game looks and feels (Battlefield V, Doom Eternal, MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries, Watch Dogs Legion, and Wolfenstein Youngblood). Again, it's not that ray tracing is bad… it's just not good enough that it's really necessary in most games.
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Unfortunately I'm at a point where outside light spillage on a floor in an enclosed space and screens-space reflections irks me. Like it will break my immersion. Especially screen-space reflections, because they're just slapped on things without any regard as to where they'll fail and it's really obvious it's failing.

I suppose that's my fault that I'm a snob though. 😛
 
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Despite having a RTX 3080, I prefer to keep RT off to eek out more FPS. In a couple of generations RT will come without that tradeoff, but for now, the minimal visual differences aren't worth it (in my experience)
 
yeah. i dont even care about RT to be honest. I can wait, it's great enough as it is if you have a nice 4k TV with that console.
 
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Admin said:
but what it all boils down to is that the consoles simply aren't as powerful as PCs with the best graphics cards, and the visual improvements offered by ray tracing in particular aren't worth the loss in performance. Shocking, right?
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How is it shocking? Sufficiently powerful hardware would make them too expensive.
 
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Phaaze88 said:
Wait, that wasn't obvious before?
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Yes, considering Nvidia's RTX cards actually need DLSS for raytracing to perform well enough and are way faster at raytracing than even the fastest AMD Radeon card.

Not only do the current gen consoles not use discrete GPUs (limiting how much heat they can generate before they need throttling), they don't have DLSS to improve performance, and their graphics are based on the RDNA architecture, as opposed to RDNA 2 used in the RX 6900 XT.

To be honest, I'm surprised they even support raytracing at all.
 
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Nolonar said:
Not only do the current gen consoles not use discrete GPUs (limiting how much heat they can generate before they need throttling)
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Which was well defined ahead of time and so the console manufacturers know what kind of cooling system they need to put on it. And it's likely consoles don't throttle, they just shutdown, because consistency is God in consoles.

Nolonar said:
they don't have DLSS to improve performance, and their graphics are based on the RDNA architecture, as opposed to RDNA 2 used in the RX 6900 XT.
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There's still FidelityFX FSR. Also they use RDNA 2. Otherwise AMD is lying to us.
 
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It's not so much that consoles aren't powerful enough for ray tracing, it's more that ray tracing as a whole is still so much in its infancy that it's still very much a brute force operation.

As we all know in computer operations over time specialized instruction sets developed to increase efficiency, be they MMX, SSE, AVX, and what have you, and specialized hardware is developed for certain tasks, be it cryptography or what have you which takes the form of a co-processor or ASIC.

Ray Tracing may always be a resource intensive operation, it is by design, but between newer ray tracing methods and what I believe will be a dedicated ray tracing co-processor in next generation MCM GPUs, which I feel will be the superior method to AMD's unified design as ray tracing becomes more of a standardized feature, that additional eye candy will be much more independent from the GPU's power.
 
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"There's still FidelityFX FSR. Also they use RDNA 2. Otherwise AMD is lying to us."

He might have meant RDNA1-class performance. IIRC, somebody said PS5s GPU performs roughly on par with a 5700XT.

That being said, even my 6900XT, factory overclocked, chokes on CP2077 at 4k native with raytracing. To be fair, AMD didn't design these GPUs with RT specifically in mind, like NVidia did with its tensor cores, and the 6900XT kicks butt in non-RT situations.
 
I had assumed this was already self-evident. There is no way the new consoles can compete with a 3080 (et.al.) in 4k with ray tracing on.
 
Well my oldish and trusty RTX 2070 support ray tracing but haven't found a game that I like and I can enable RT and enjoy it.

What I meant is, for example, BFV was/is very pretty with RT On, but Im usually too busy killing stuff and keeping my head down to really appreciate it.

I would really understand a simulator with ray tracing (for example my beloved Euro Truck Simulator 2), but action games where FPS and fast reactions are a must I don't think is really that important, at least not for me and not right now.
 
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blppt said:
"There's still FidelityFX FSR. Also they use RDNA 2. Otherwise AMD is lying to us."

He might have meant RDNA1-class performance. IIRC, somebody said PS5s GPU performs roughly on par with a 5700XT.
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The "as opposed to RDNA 2" seems to imply they think the PS5's GPU uses RDNA 1.

And I had a quick look around the interwebs to see that there was indeed some confusion about the PS5's GPU having an RDNA 2 GPU, but I think it's just people misunderstanding that Microsoft said it'd leverage features of the GPU while Sony seemed quiet on that front. Also if it really was as performant as RDNA 1, then it wouldn't even touch the XBSX in terms of quality and performance if we went by AMD's claim that RDNA2 is 65% better per watt than RDNA 1. But the PS5 seems to do just fine against the XBSX.
 
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hotaru.hino said:
The "as opposed to RDNA 2" seems to imply they think the PS5's GPU uses RDNA 1.
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Yes, sorry about that. I had checked on Wikipedia to see what the architecture was for the PS5. Didn't expect Wikipedia to be wrong (though I should've known better).

EDIT: To be fair, I didn't think to check their source. It clearly says "RDNA 2-based" in their source.
 
Alvar "Miles" Udell said:
It's not so much that consoles aren't powerful enough for ray tracing, it's more that ray tracing as a whole is still so much in its infancy that it's still very much a brute force operation.

As we all know in computer operations over time specialized instruction sets developed to increase efficiency, be they MMX, SSE, AVX, and what have you, and specialized hardware is developed for certain tasks, be it cryptography or what have you which takes the form of a co-processor or ASIC.

Ray Tracing may always be a resource intensive operation, it is by design, but between newer ray tracing methods and what I believe will be a dedicated ray tracing co-processor in next generation MCM GPUs, which I feel will be the superior method to AMD's unified design as ray tracing becomes more of a standardized feature, that additional eye candy will be much more independent from the GPU's power.
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Remember how game physics used to the next big thing?

Considering how it spanned out for PhysX and its PPU expansion card, too much fixed-function hardware might be too expensive an proposition. To my understanding, it's not as if ray-tracing calculation is not a good fit to typical GPGPU capability anyway.
 
While RDNA2 is RT capable, it is not new that it doesn't perform very well with RT enabled. They can squeeze out additional performance with FSR, but to push 4K@60 FPS is itself quite a significant effort even without RT.
 
We're talking about a title that's going to be available on the PS4 and Xbox One. The decision to not have RT on the consoles could simply be a matter of human resource. Making a separate version leveraging next-gen hardware would require hiring additional play testers and programmers--just for the transition period.
 
watzupken said:
While RDNA2 is RT capable, it is not new that it doesn't perform very well with RT enabled. They can squeeze out additional performance with FSR, but to push 4K@60 FPS is itself quite a significant effort even without RT.
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It supposedly meets the DirectX12 requirements for RT - whatever that means.
 
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