What spurred this question is Alan Wake 2, and to a degree RT Overdrive in Cyberpunk, but since it’s recent and the devs released a handy and specific spec sheet, I’ll talk about Alan Wake.
For Alan Wake 2 with Path Tracing on and Ray Tracing set to medium, you need an RTX4070, DLSS set to Quality, a CPU equivalent to a 3700X, 12GB of VRAM and 16GB of System RAM.
If you want RT High with Path Tracing at 4K60, you need to bump up to an RTX4080, lower DLSS to Performance, and 4 more GB of VRAM.
It’s very intense, it’s at the cutting edge right now. Consoles (PS5 specifically) run the game at Medium-Low settings for 60FPS without RT, and it still looks absolutely incredible.
But my question is purely just because I’m curious, do you think we’ll see Path Tracing in consoles in the near future, or is it a far future thing? Right now a DLSS equivalent is needed, and the consoles would realistically need something like that too, likely bespoke. So COULD it be possible in “Quality” graphics presets for, say, a PS6? Or would it be PS7 minimum?
I think it COULD come around in PS6 but is unlikely, since PS6’s generation will be the same as the RTX6000 series and whatever AMD’s equivalent is to that. But whether or not that means, say, a 6060 could run Alan Wake 2 using the settings outlined for a 4080 above, I can’t say.
I think fully pathtraced rendering is only going to exist at the high end for the foreseeable future. Developers want to push the limits which is always going to mean that lower end hardware has to make some sacrifices on the most demanding aspects. The next generation of consoles should be fully capable of doing it in theory but in games pushing the hardware to its limits there may be better ways to use the hardware to its fullest.
If anything it’s not consoles that will make it ubiquitous it’s cloud gaming, be that geforce now, or Xbox and PlayStations equivalents. I’m not sure how I feel about it myself but I think cloud gaming could be the future.