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
'Hey, AMD...Ray tracing is great but your Ray tracing hardware solution kinda sucks'
Current gen consoles players favor 60fps over raytracing, so i dont think this is much of a loss.
<some months later>
Nvidia peons: Boss! We figured it out! Down sample the image and rescale to the native resolution.
Nvidia Boss: That sounds like something we already do.....
Nvidia peons: Nope, that's something different. We'll design some algorithms that makes things better and with ray tracing active, it'll help restore most of the lost fps!
Nvidia Boss: That still sounds like something we already do, but if you say we don't, then do it!
<some more time passes>
Nvidia peons: We got it done! We call it Deep Learning Super Sampling or DLSS. It's easy to incorporate into games for the developers and anyone can use it!
Nvidia Boss: Perfect! Make it a proprietary piece of software for us and let us corner the market on this gimmick...err...evolution of gaming! Long live ray tracing!
I don't see how folks can feel that ray tracing is a good thing to promote with this current level of hardware. Sure, it can be done, but not without sacrificing performance or requiring the use of other software tricks to keep the frame rates in a desirable range. At least they're not trying to push ray tracing on the consoles, which would really have a performance hit.
What next? 4K kill FPS, so might as well play at 1440p right :roll:
Also ubisoft engine is not the best and they are pretty conservative with new tech
"Hey Nvidia, thanks for the usual bags of Gameworks money, so we can parrot your PC exclusive, overly expensive money trap on our least favorite platform. I mean, we are the game company of '30 FPS is the best gamur framerate' and 'We hate PC piracy' and 'We love double DRM'. We also pushed your TAA blurfest earlier, so why not? Please add DLSS 2.0 so we can achieve the 30 FPS now, ok? We'll ensure it stutters anyway everytjme you load a world block".
/threadThis. Ubisoft is explicitly telling the console market RT wont happen without major perf impact that detracts from the experience. The PC platform wins here for still being the early adopter of new tech. AMD wins in market control, and Nvidia spends money to defend its sacred yet lonely garden.Actually, you are spot on there.....because of ALL those games that did show us how much of a performance hit it did "not" inflict on them?
The gist is, without DLSS you're looking at halved frames. Consoles haven't got that headroom, contrary to 1200 dollar GPUs. And even for that all you get is close range shadows and hopefully something in lighting, that is often hard to distinguish from raster. You also get cars looking like mirrors.
I remember Hairworks in TW3. It had a similar performance effect and Geralt looked like he was doing an instagram shoot instead of having normal hair. I'll pass for now, thx.
RT aside, the thing is what will happen with future next-gen-only titles even in rasterized graphics. Not even now with cross-gen graphics games run on true 4K on the new consoles, but rather 1800p at best. I hope this 4K/60 does not become adaptive 1440p/60 as the new consoles seem like a nice alternative if the gpu shortages continue into 2022. Let's see what gains we can expect when image reconstruction based on DirectML comes out.
Error, mission failed then Stephanie, mission f&£#@& failed.
if I knew enough about this stuff and was working at that company I would LOVE to see what I could do to make it work as good as possible, its just a challenge, it would be fun.
they have RT in Watch Dogs Legion as an early attempt/go at it and that worked well enough....and now a later game with more experience and its a nope.avi? just weak and weird.
also lets not forget Spiderman, RT reflections and 60 fps.....
That, and shareholder's deadlines. These installments are yearly or bi yearly for good reasons not in our interest.
I either still have (or have replaced) an RTX 2060, RTX 2060S, RTX 2070S, Quadro RTX 6000, Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 3060, and RTX 3060Ti, and am yet to be impressed by a single raytracing game or demo. The only thing a pair of 3090s in SLI would prove is that $6000 of raytracing hardware is just about fast enough to hide the performance penalty raytracing imposes.
The whole experience is bullshit and I buy RTX cards in spite of raytracing not because of it.