Are next-generation consoles - PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S - not powerful enough to guarantee optimal fluidity with ray tracing?
On October 7, Ubisoft will release its next big production, its next AAA project, Far Cry 6. Unveiled in July 2020, the game was supposed to be released a few months later, on February 18th to be exact. Like many other video game publishers, however, Ubisoft was forced to deal with the consequences of the health crisis and the development process of a game like Far Cry 6 is hardly compatible with such a reorganization. Unsurprisingly, the project has been largely postponed. A postponement that does not seem to be enough for the teams in charge of development to activate some of the most expected features on next-generation consoles.
When they released their PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, Sony and Microsoft emphasized the renewed power of their home consoles. This power should logically allow you to enjoy a 4K image definition and an animation speed of at least 60 frames per second in all circumstances. However, other features have since been added to the table, in particular ray tracing, which NVIDIA has been promoting on its GeForce RTX 2000 and 3000 series graphics cards. The problem is that ray tracing is particularly resource-intensive and that's where Ubisoft's problem lies.
Indeed, through Stephanie Brenham, the project's programming manager, we learn that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions will not benefit from ray tracing, which will only be activated on PC. To our colleagues of WCCFTech, she explains: " Ray tracing is a feature reserved for PC. On consoles, our goal has been to take advantage of the new hardware capabilities by optimizing performance to aim for 4K and guarantee 60 frames per second.
Unsurprisingly, Ubisoft is trying to address the main concerns of gamers here, and pitting fluidity of animation against ray tracing in a fairly logical way. However, it's a pity to encounter the first limitations of so-called next-generation consoles less than a year after their release. Moreover, if we understand that Ubisoft reserves ray tracing for the PC version only, we wonder why it does the same with the Fidelity FX Super Resolution imagined by AMD precisely to have a higher quality image without having a significant impact on performance and, why not, enable ray tracing?
