PlayStation 5: what can we expect from ray-tracing on next-gen? - article

With nearly thirty games shown during the PlayStation 5 showcase, it should come as no surprise that Digital Foundry has quite a lot to talk about, starting with one of the most promising signs: both first party and games developed by external studios use ray tracing technology via console hardware acceleration.

But which games use RT one hundred percent? What effects did they show, and how do they work? And above all, what role can we imagine for ray tracing in the new generation of consoles?

To begin we give Cesare what is Caesar's: hardware accelerated ray tracing debuted in November 2018, when DICE updated Battlefield 5 implementing it with remarkable results, even if not at the state of the art.

Another update followed in the following months, and then various productions implemented the RT from there. So let's not talk about a new technology but what really amazes is the speed with which the console world is adopting it, and how many games of the first wave of PS5 use it, especially thinking about the computational cost.

But by the way, how much does it cost? We learned it on our skin two years ago, when on PC the titles that support RTX saw the frame rate collapse of important percentages even with a single active effect at 4K (specifically the reflections), while playing with the most powerful GPU available on the market. Other effects such as shadows are cheaper but still not cheap. The point is that console hardware is usually built to have the best value for money possible, and developers will surely have to keep that in mind to maintain acceptable resolutions and frame rates. In fact, in the first wave of PS5 games we have seen, the direction that many are taking is already clear.