I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say this. Ray Tracing is cool and all, but consoles are not ready for it yet, not even the Series X. A RTX 3060 can hardly handle it. If it does somehow make it into the game, at least give us the option to enable or disable it. Take Black Ops Cold War for example, on the Series X. As soon as you enable Ray Tracing you get immediate frame rate drops and stutter that won’t go away and all kinda glitches with textures and shadows acting crazy. All of the big fire team maps seem like they run at 43fps with Ray Tracing on, it’s just not a good option for consoles. To be honest, it doesn’t really even make that big of a difference. Not a big enough difference to suffer that amount of performance decrease. So please developers please please please! If you add it to the game, please give us the option to enable or disable it.
I have to agree. Halo 3 didn’t have ray tracing and for its era it had some amazing lighting, it was all developer tricks. With current technology and some hard work, 343 can make Infinite look absolutely phenomenal even without ray tracing, and of course without the performance hindering.
While I agree with you, I think it’s only fair that if added gamers like myself should at least have the option for enabling and disabling Ray Tracing. If I decide I want to play the campaign and I Want it to look CRAZY good then I’m gonna want to enable ray tracing. If I want to switch to Multiplayer and get a few games in, I’ll turn it off. To be honest there should not be an option for it in multiplayer but we’re talking “what if” so ill include that too. If I want crazy good performance with Good graphics and more options to tune then I’ll hop on my PC, but I mostly use my console for the graphics. Yes ray tracing is Sub Par on consoles (Especially COD lol) but the option is what matters.
If me loving what I see means I’m stuck at 30fps again I’m fine with that. Console players have been stuck at 30fps for the longest anyway. Even if its not something you would want, there are always people that might. Again having the option is what matters most.
> 2535425788598359;1:
> I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say this. Ray Tracing is cool and all, but consoles are not ready for it yet, not even the Series X. A RTX 3060 can hardly handle it. If it does somehow make it into the game, at least give us the option to enable or disable it. Take Black Ops Cold War for example, on the Series X. As soon as you enable Ray Tracing you get immediate frame rate drops and stutter that won’t go away and all kinda glitches with textures and shadows acting crazy. All of the big fire team maps seem like they run at 43fps with Ray Tracing on, it’s just not a good option for consoles. To be honest, it doesn’t really even make that big of a difference. Not a big enough difference to suffer that amount of performance decrease. So please developers please please please! If you add it to the game, please give us the option to enable or disable it.
I imagine Halo Infinite will have the option to enable / disable ray tracing when the game gets it. As for CoD, that’s a bad example of console ray tracing, and not good to use as an example imo. DOOM Eternal is amazing on Series X with ray tracing enabled.
It actually does make a big difference when it’s well implemented. It runs at 60fps with ray tracing on my tv, but don’t take my word for it… Digital Foundry, DOOM Eternal ray tracing tested on Series Consoles and PS5.
Would be silly if it didn’t let you turn it off once they add it in, considering most people don’t even own a Nvidia or AMD GPU that can handle ray tracing due to how horrible the current GPU market still is.
Since the ray tracing is also being added in later, I’m pretty sure they’ll mostly be using it to do real time reflections, some games that get post ray tracing support tend to just mostly use it to get real reflections going and don’t use it to really upgrade the regular lighting all that much but who knows maybe 343 will use it to give Infinite a significant lighting upgrade too.
Look at the recent ray tracing update for Doom Eternal, what it did mostly was add real time reflections to shinny reflective surfaces and water but the base lighting is almost exactly the same really.
Just on an extra note, there’s maybe 3 games that come to my mind that use ray tracing heavily and to its fullest potential and that’s Quake 2 RTX, Cyberpunk2077 and Metro Exodus, other games tend to just opt in some feature of it but not all of em’ due to performance concerns and also maybe time constraints.
I think you’re wrong, the new consoles are ready for ray tracing, it just needs to be optimized to the maximum so that halo infinite does not have FPS losses.
I suspect raytracing will be mainly limited to campaign with little to no implementation in multiplayer.
Games that feature ray tracing on Series X have a toggle. The only exception to that I would say is The Medium but that’s not a FPS, more of a walking puzzle game so it’s less heavy on performance.
Whilst your description of Cold War is a fair one you should also look at games that do Ray Tracing well on Console such as DOOM Eternal. The Series X handles it super well with close to zero frame drops and DOOM is a super intense game for graphical fidelity and speed. If it can handle Ray Tracing I’m sure Halo Infinite could too.
I don’t think players are going to be forced into ray tracing, that’s very unlikely. When ray tracing becomes a option either at launch or after we’ll likely see a few options such as performance, fidelity or ray tracing. A lot of games are following this trend at the moment - allows you to choose what you want to prioritise whilst playing on your new hardware.
Well, 343 has done PC right so far, and ray tracing being optional is pretty much mandatory for every game. Like you said 20 series can’t do -Yoink- in terms of ray tracing, and if you somehow manage to get your hands on a 3070 or 3080 thats the only viable way to play with ray tracing consistently, but even then that -Yoink- tanks your fps
And thats even if RT will be a thing on release, way back before the delay they said it wasn’t launching with it.
I believe they have said there will be no ray tracing at launch. However it is a strong possibility that ray tracing will be added down the road much like Doom Eternal added ray tracing about a year after its release. I’m certain if they do add ray tracing there will be a toggle for it on console, and PC should have multiple different options for how strong the RT effects should be. Worst case PC gets a simple on/off toggle for ray tracing. I would love to see them have a 30fps mode for campaign on console where graphical fidelity and other options are turned up even more even if ray tracing isn’t there. More choices is always better after all.
> 2535425788598359;1:
> I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say this. Ray Tracing is cool and all, but consoles are not ready for it yet, not even the Series X. A RTX 3060 can hardly handle it. If it does somehow make it into the game, at least give us the option to enable or disable it. Take Black Ops Cold War for example, on the Series X. As soon as you enable Ray Tracing you get immediate frame rate drops and stutter that won’t go away and all kinda glitches with textures and shadows acting crazy. All of the big fire team maps seem like they run at 43fps with Ray Tracing on, it’s just not a good option for consoles. To be honest, it doesn’t really even make that big of a difference. Not a big enough difference to suffer that amount of performance decrease. So please developers please please please! If you add it to the game, please give us the option to enable or disable it.
Ray Tracing has picked up a reputation for dropping framerates.
60fps allows 16.66 milliseconds (ms) per frame to process the picture and effects. As powerful as the specialised Ray Tracing Cores are, the extra process in the lighting/shadow/reflection pipeline can still add 3ms to 17 ms extra to each frame-time, so it drops the framerate like this:
16.66ms + 3ms = 19.66ms = 50.8 fps.
16.66ms + 17ms = 33.66ms = 29.7 fps.
Average = 16.66ms + 10ms = 26.66ms = 37.5 fps.
The short-term “quick fix” has been to lower frame-times by dropping resolution (e.g. from 4K to 1440p to hold 60fps), then AI Upscaling to 4K using NVidia’s DLSS, creating a 4K/60fps effect.
Longer term, to hold 4K at 60fps (16.66 ms/frame) but now including that extra average 10ms per frame for ray tracing, we need to get the rest of the frametime down to 6.66ms, which would be 150fps or more at 4K. How? Next-Gen Engines can switch on the rest of the next-gen hardware, including…
- A Smart FOV (Field of View), using:
- Smart Geometry (Mesh Shaders).
- Smart Texturing (SFS, XVA, VRS).
- Then add Smart Ray Tracing (RT Accelerator Cores).
SMART GEOMETRY WITH MESH SHADERS & “CULLING”.
Instead of rendering whole chunks of maps including wastefully making loads of graphics that we can’t even see because something is behind something else or round the corner out of sight, the graphics power, memory and next-gen SSD’s are fast enough to only process what we see in direct line of sight - only the front half of objects, and nothing behind them (called “culling”), unless it’s needed for a light-bounce calculation by the ray tracing cores. This massively cuts the workload at 4K without having to lower the overall resolution.
In the video below, let’s see Mesh Shaders with Culling bump framerates from 30-60fps to 300-600+ fps. At even just 300fps, the frametime is now just 3.3 ms for exactly the same picture, giving us the spare time of 13.3ms to process all the extra ray-tracing calculations yet still hit 16.66ms overall per frame, and so hold 60fps with ray tracing on!
- time 1.18: picture “culling” described.
- 1.42: seen in practice.
- 1.58: new Mesh Shader Benchmark shown.
- 2.43: note 30-60fps with Mesh Shaders OFF jumps up (time 3.14) to 300-600fps with Mesh Shaders ON.
- 3.43: percentage improvement is 5-8 times better on NVidia chips, but 16-18 times better on AMD parts like XBox Series X (which is a cut-down RX 6800 chip, so would score around 380-400fps). This is why consoles, being based on AMD Tech, really do need true next-gen Game Engines like UE5 and Slipspace 2.0 after 343i upgrade it, to access all the power of the new hardware including the Mesh Shader smart geometry system, and not just the ray-tracing cores on their own. THIS is how to get 4K/60fps ray tracing on a Series X!
https://youtu.be/IjY6iLP5qgs?t=78 .
Series X is around that NVidia RTX 3060Ti to 3070 range. Justice is the first game to port their geometry over to Mesh Shaders, allowing a 3060Ti to do 4K/60fps with ray tracing ON:
https://youtu.be/rWr–L8pCv8?t=33 .
From the “lowliest” to the highest next-gen cards and consoles, from NVidia’s RTX 2060 and 3060 to AMD’s RX 6700XT and the Series S & X, all will get huge performance boosts whilst ray tracing once next-gen engines unleash all the powers of their as yet untapped hardware!
Hope this helps. 