GamingGPUs

DMC 5 SE Coming to PS5|XSX w/ Ray-Tracing at 4K 30 FPS: RT Reflections on Consoles Seem Quite Inferior to RTX on PC

Capcom just announced the Special Edition of Devil May Cry 5, and like many other remasters/remakes announced recently, it’ll feature ray-tracing. The game will boast ray-traced reflections, global illumination and lighting.

The above screenshot shows a comparison of the reflections with ray-tracing turned on vs ray-tracing turned off. While there’s a big difference between the two, it’s nowhere close to what we saw with PC titles like Control. (See on Drive)

As you can see, the reflections are much sharper and high-resolution. This is because, on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, the number of rays cast per frame is much lower than on the PC version of Control. Plus, there’s no DLSS 2.0 to speed up the performance (yet). Lastly, unlike on RTX graphics cards where the RTCores are used for BVH traversal acceleration, ray-box and ray-triangle testing, separately (and concurrently) from the main shader pipeline, the RDNA 2 GPUs (XSX/PS5) use the standard shaders for traversal, rather than dedicated hardware units. Furthermore, the ray-tracing units on RDNA 2 share resources with the texture units. Only one of them can run each execution cycle, not both. NVIDIA’s ray-tracing solution is separate and completely independent of the main graphics and compute pipeline.

The RDNA 2 GPU only accelerates Box intersection and triangle intersection while the traversal is done by the main shaders
Global Illumination
Lighting

In the above two images you can see GI and lighting. The ray-traced versions are much better than the rasterized ones but it still leaves a fair bit to be desired. On top of all this, the game will run at 4K 30 FPS of 1080p 60 FPS with ray-tracing, or 1080 120 FPS without RT. This is despite the fact that the ray-tracing solution is far from impressive and casts much lower rays per scene than it should. This is the reality check we all needed. (Zolpidem) As such, don’t expect the majority of games to run at 4K 60 FPS with ray-tracing turned on. Certain less intensive game and first-party titles should do it, but not the majority of them.

Areej Syed

Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Divinity, Torment, Baldur's Gate and so much more... Contact: areejs12@hardwaretimes.com.
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