Wednesday, September 22nd 2021
Is the New Old Already? Far Cry 6 Raytracing Exclusive to PC Version, PS5 and Xbox Series Left Out
Stephanie Brenham, Team Lead Programmer for Ubisoft's upcoming AAA Far Cry 6, recently spoke to WCCFTech on the upcoming Far Cry installment. Stephanie went into some detail regarding the graphics and performance options, and an interesting fact that surfaced was that neither Sony's PS5 nor Microsoft's Xbox Series consoles will feature ray tracing enabled on their respective versions of the game. Apparently, ray tracing will be a PC-exclusive feature, as console versions of the game are targeting higher render resolution and more fluid framerates over expensive graphics options such as ray tracing. And even on PC, it'll be a hybrid form of it, and not a full implementation: ray tracing is supported for both shadows and reflections, but Ubisoft opted for a hybrid approach here, marrying traditional rendering with ray tracing so as to improve performance in mainstream PC hardware.
"Ray tracing is a PC-only feature," Stephanie Brenham said. "On console, our objective has been to take advantage of new hardware capabilities, optimizing performance targeting 4K and achieving 60 FPS." This does somewhat fall in the face of performance expectations set by both Sony and Microsoft; both companies made (and still make) extensive use of ray tracing support on the marketing campaigns for their consoles. However, as we've seen in the past, enabling ray tracing comes with severe performance penalties in even the latest and greatest PC hardware (sometimes not to best effect, even), which still outclasses even the latest consoles' powerful innards (compared to their predecessors, of course).
Like ray tracing, but somewhat more puzzlingly, support for AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution (FSR) tech is limited to the PC version of Far Cry 6, despite games supporting the technology having already been announced for both the Xbox Series and PS5 consoles. It seems like a trend is starting to form here: a trend where ray tracing is just too expensive to be fully utilized in the current crop of consoles. Perhaps we'll get there after a midlife console hardware refresh, if history repeats itself.
Source:
WCCFTech
"Ray tracing is a PC-only feature," Stephanie Brenham said. "On console, our objective has been to take advantage of new hardware capabilities, optimizing performance targeting 4K and achieving 60 FPS." This does somewhat fall in the face of performance expectations set by both Sony and Microsoft; both companies made (and still make) extensive use of ray tracing support on the marketing campaigns for their consoles. However, as we've seen in the past, enabling ray tracing comes with severe performance penalties in even the latest and greatest PC hardware (sometimes not to best effect, even), which still outclasses even the latest consoles' powerful innards (compared to their predecessors, of course).
38 Comments on Is the New Old Already? Far Cry 6 Raytracing Exclusive to PC Version, PS5 and Xbox Series Left Out
And after all these years ppl still believe in marketing BS as usual.
If you look at the platform list there are PS4 and XBOX one.
The reason behind might as simple as they don't wanna spend time and resources to optimize and play test RT and no RT console versions.
Also games still have low polygons models and low resolution textures, in addition the collision system is very poor even in games like Fifa where the ball can go through the foot of the player.
RT nice feature but too early for excessive excitement.
With a bit of effort, all of these effects are readily available. RT trades creativity and talent for a 'plaster me on there' thing that costs a shit ton of horsepower to eliminate the need for talent.
I'll take talented devs before letting the hardware create something unplayable, in fact, with the focus on graphics before gameplay some triple A stuff has, its quickly becoming the impression to me that shitty content has RTX (bar exceptions, mind), heavily sponsored content has RTX and *might* also be a good game (Control, Metro Exodus), and the rest is entirely forgettable.
Meanwhile, the list of good to great to utterly mind blowing indie games keeps growing, and RT isn't even remotely in the picture there. Console game lists keep growing, and RT isn't even remotely in the picture. A vast number of PC gamers hasn't got access to RT capable hardware. This chicken-egg problem is going to last with no end in sight as of now.
RT is cool but we can go without it.
well ... it's not like RTRT is a really useful thing ... even if it had a lower impact on lower end cards, but now it feels like a bait for getting the high end cards for those who follow the "RTRT IS THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF GAMING!" while it does not bring a lot to the table ...
well, at last that tech will maybe be "standard" later (read "long later") unlike Hairwork.
well with DLSS 2.0 those *wasted space* Tensor Core can be of use, the wasted space (notice the lack of * ) RT core ... not much ...
i always laugh at
"The long-sought after holy-grail of computer graphics rendering—real-time ray tracing—is now reality in single-GPU systems with the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture. Turing GPUs introduce new RT Cores, accelerator units that are dedicated to performing ray tracing operations with extraordinary efficiency"
from developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-turing-architecture-in-depth/
IMO until the chip shortage clears up and there are more gamers experiencing RT the technology will remain rather niche.
As for the consoles not incorporating it, it's not surprising, considering how the consoles compare to PCs with modern graphic cards. They're called potatoes by some people for a reason. The devs obviously want to prioritize frame rate and that "experience" over features. Obviously it would be nice to have both, but they're going to pick performance over quality of graphics IMO any day.
Ubisoft devs: "hmm Ray tracing seems to be the buzz word that most gamers talk about but we see most of them turn it off to achive high frame rate on PC, let alone consoles, so why waste development time on a feature that applies hardly any difference on an already extremely limited ray tracing current consoles that we know, based on telemetry data, that most players would turn it off for 60 fps mode right ? "
Ubisoft devs2:" you make good points, ray tracing was a mistake anyway, we can make baked reflections that look just as good without performance hits so why bother anyway....F it, throw that sht out of consoles, our engine is outdated anyway, lets just focus on what matters...60fps gameplay, and lock ray tracing on PC only because fking Nvidia spent millions marketing it to PC players and their 1200$ RTX cards so i guess we are obliged to do it on that platform"
well, in short, you are right :D nonetheless, i have "abdominable" issue now. (my own "abominable abdominal" portmanteau)