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Digital Foundry: Xbox Series X ray tracing performance <= 2060 Super

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Saw this in the Watch Dogs video by Alex. He found xbox series x settings in the PC version of Watch Dogs. PS5 settings are there too (Prospero) and they are near identical to the xsx settings. So this should mean both Xbox and PS5 are equivalent to a 2060 Super when it comes to ray tracing.

2060 Super ray tracing doesnt have checkerboarding and does several things better (texture clarity, AF etc) while maintaining the same framerate in like to like sections. Outdoors, the xsx version basically runs at 1440p while the 2060 super seems to offer 24 fps at native 4k which should become 48 fps when going down to 1440p.

Timestamped:


He didnt have the PS5 version but since the settings are identical (reflections checkerboard at 1080p), it seems the PS5 ray tracing performance should be identical.

Not a good first effort by AMD in my opinion, if their 12 tflops gpu is offering worse performance in ray traced games than a 7 tflops nvidia gpu then we are going to have a pretty lame gen. Hopefully most devs just skip ray tracing altogether and go the Demon Souls route.

P.S The XSX is supposedly as strong as a 2080 according to Microsoft in Gears. so standard rasterization performance is pretty good for RDNA 2.0 GPUs.
 

geordiemp

Member
Saw this in the Watch Dogs video by Alex. He found xbox series x settings in the PC version of Watch Dogs. PS5 settings are there too (Prospero) and they are near identical to the xsx settings. So this should mean both Xbox and PS5 are equivalent to a 2060 Super when it comes to ray tracing.

2060 Super ray tracing doesnt have checkerboarding and does several things better (texture clarity, AF etc) while maintaining the same framerate in like to like sections. Outdoors, the xsx version basically runs at 1440p while the 2060 super seems to offer 24 fps at native 4k which should become 48 fps when going down to 1440p.

Timestamped:


He didnt have the PS5 version but since the settings are identical (reflections checkerboard at 1080p), it seems the PS5 ray tracing performance should be identical.

Not a good first effort by AMD in my opinion, if their 12 tflops gpu is offering worse performance in ray traced games than a 7 tflops nvidia gpu then we are going to have a pretty lame gen. Hopefully most devs just skip ray tracing altogether and go the Demon Souls route.

P.S The XSX is supposedly as strong as a 2080 according to Microsoft in Gears. so standard rasterization performance is pretty good for RDNA 2.0 GPUs.


Your missing the point, RTX 2060S is not 7.5 TF for ray tracing, it has separate dedicated cores and has decent RT power.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Your missing the point, RTX 2060S is not 7.5 TF for ray tracing, it has separate dedicated cores and has decent RT power.
Yeah, but both series x and ps5 also have hardware based ray tracing with dedicated blocks for rt. they are just coming at the expense of standard rasterization which is a bizarre implementation by AMD.
 

Grinchy

Banned
Wait, does it mean that they are both completely equal to the 2060 performance for raytracing, or does it mean that the developers of Watch Dogs have a profile for the 2060 that they just decided to use for the consoles to make their lives easier while making their mediocre game?
 

geordiemp

Member
Yeah, but both series x and ps5 also have hardware based ray tracing with dedicated blocks for rt. they are just coming at the expense of standard rasterization which is a bizarre implementation by AMD.

Its not bizare at all, AMD dont have a custom block, they just shared the RT with the shader core. For PC parts the 128 MB of L3 helps with the caching and performance and consoles cant afford the die space for GPU L3 or a dedicated solution .

Nvidia GPUs have alot of dedicated blocks to ray tracing, again die space consoles cant afford. PC space is different costs and budgets.
 
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Not to be reductive, but fuck Ray Tracing. It’s just too computationally expensive in our current technological landscape, particularly in relationship to consoles.
I think we still get RT but with extremely low quality, to reduce performance penalty. (compared to RTX)
 

quest

Not Banned from OT
Yeah, but both series x and ps5 also have hardware based ray tracing with dedicated blocks for rt. they are just coming at the expense of standard rasterization which is a bizarre implementation by AMD.
It is to save die space to allow them to beef up the rest to take on nvidia in non ray tracing games. In a year or 2 the ray tracing puddles will go away for other items. If the consoles don't do much ray tracing then nvidia is sol for a while. Be thankful die space was not wasted on this at this time it is just to soon on an APU.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Not to be reductive, but fuck Ray Tracing. It’s just too computationally expensive in our current technological landscape, particularly in relationship to consoles.
i am playing spiderman right now and it looks spectacular with ray tracing on. really enhances the image. i am uploading a 30 second clip from a combat section in Miles that looks absolutely stunning because of all the reflections.

but demon souls still looks better and is 60 fps at 1440p so you might have a point there.
Wait, does it mean that they are both completely equal to the 2060 performance for raytracing, or does it mean that the developers of Watch Dogs have a profile for the 2060 that they just decided to use for the consoles to make their lives easier while making their mediocre game?
No. Some watch dogs hackers on PC found xbox and ps5 settings and Alex just picked those settings on his PC version.


GEWM3eX.png
 

cucuchu

Member
Not to be reductive, but fuck Ray Tracing. It’s just too computationally expensive in our current technological landscape, particularly in relationship to consoles.

Consoles, yes, considering 20XX series RT was more about an advertisement bullet and proof of concept, more or less, where as 30XX series we are seeing practical performance w/ RT enabled, especially so with DLSS enabled.
 
I don't think this game could hit 60fps even without RT, which is odd given how WD2 performs. 'Cinematic' mode should never be the only option.

I would have considered this game if they had 60fps mode.
 
The RT in MM is pretty impressive at 4K30 IMO. Could a 2060S do that?
How do we know? It's exclusive.
However we got Forza Horizon 4 which is very optimized and runs on potato. 4K60fps on ultra is easy for 2070, but XSX runs at lower settings.
In short - if MM will be on PC I think it will run same or better than PS5 with RTX2060s. Hell RTX have DLSS which we forgot 🙃
 
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Lethal01

Member
I would suggest waiting a year or so before taking these kinds of analysis to seriously judging the literal first games to include RT on Consoles vs performance on NVIDA that devs have had a couple years to optimize for is a bit too much. Not saying that this is definitely wrong, but I'd the case is far from closed.

Not to be reductive, but fuck Ray Tracing. It’s just too computationally expensive in our current technological landscape, particularly in relationship to consoles.

ON Raytracing Reflections in general. People like to say that it's dumb because all it's good for is making puddles and windows look good but I'd put it this way. The second that you introduce a scene with a lot of shiny surfaces to any modern game they fall apart and start looking trashy outside of very small controlled areas.

All the reflections in Spiderman and watchdog look fucking nasty without reflections and they are some of the better implementations.
 

McHuj

Member
I don't think anyone should be making any judgments about the capability of the hardware based on launch titles, especially ubisoft ones.

This gen will be no different than any other, 2-3 years from now we'll finally be getting true next gen software, and 5 years from now we'll be getting games that will cause people to ask "how is this possible on such an old machine?"
 
Very strange indeed. Miles Morales looks better than a lot of PC titles which have ray tracing. At this point it is the poster child for ray-traced reflections.

This will need more investigation as to why Sony's first party were able to achieve this, but Ubisoft was not.
 
Saw this in the Watch Dogs video by Alex. He found xbox series x settings in the PC version of Watch Dogs. PS5 settings are there too (Prospero) and they are near identical to the xsx settings. So this should mean both Xbox and PS5 are equivalent to a 2060 Super when it comes to ray tracing.

2060 Super ray tracing doesnt have checkerboarding and does several things better (texture clarity, AF etc) while maintaining the same framerate in like to like sections. Outdoors, the xsx version basically runs at 1440p while the 2060 super seems to offer 24 fps at native 4k which should become 48 fps when going down to 1440p.

Timestamped:


He didnt have the PS5 version but since the settings are identical (reflections checkerboard at 1080p), it seems the PS5 ray tracing performance should be identical.

Not a good first effort by AMD in my opinion, if their 12 tflops gpu is offering worse performance in ray traced games than a 7 tflops nvidia gpu then we are going to have a pretty lame gen. Hopefully most devs just skip ray tracing altogether and go the Demon Souls route.

P.S The XSX is supposedly as strong as a 2080 according to Microsoft in Gears. so standard rasterization performance is pretty good for RDNA 2.0 GPUs.

Nvidia are ahead in both Ray Tracing and DLSS type applications compared to AMD.
While AMD has brought a far better product to market in the RDNA 2 cards, Nvidia still has the more impressive cards.
I tend to bat for the underdog, so I really hope AMD put it to Nvidia over the next couple of GPU generations.

But let's not also forget, these are first generation PS5 and XSX games, and were moat likely rushed to market while having to work around Covid.
When devs get used to AMD Ray tracing tech, and both the Direct RT and Sony's RT API, it's going to perform better than a 2060.

In the future, I personally think there will be a move towards hybrid RT. Game engines will evolve to get full RT looking effect, while not using full Ray tracing.

And let's be honest, in six months we are all going to be over playing games that are set in rainy cities with lots of Windows. In normal game situations, the call on RT is going to be less.
 

THE DUCK

voted poster of the decade by bots
I don't think this is really the game to judge anything on. They have spend 1000 hours trying to optimize the RT, or 5 minutes.
 

-Arcadia-

Banned
Miles Morales gives me hope for console ray tracing without the harsher penalties. 4K, solid 30 FPS, and with that city, is a pretty awesome deal.

I think the difference is that MM’s seems a lot more understanding of console limitations, while WD’s is still doing things like reflections in reflections, full detail scenery in reflections (instead of MM’s cut down world in RT), etc.
 

Jacksfr

Neo Member
How do we know? It's exclusive.
However we got Forza Horizon 4 which is very optimized and runs on potato. 4K60fps on ultra is easy for 2070, but XSX runs at lower settings.
In short - if MM will be on PC I think it will run same or better than PS5 with RTX2060s. Hell RTX have DLSS which we forgot 🙃
Easy? Every benchmark i saw 2070 run from 45 to 55 at 4K ultra depending on the weather..
 
Why do PC gamers *always* forget the benefits of developing for a closed system.

Show me a PC Game on a 1.8tf GPU that looks as good as TLOU2...

Same will happen here, PC gamers will scoff then the exclusives will roll out (especially on PS5) then they will go quiet again, this includes RT which is in its infancy on these machines
 
This was just for WD: Legion. Different games, especially 1P games, will be coded differently and likely have much more optimized implementations of RT that a 2060 Super can't pull off. Might be a year or two before we start to see that, however.

Always find it so odd how some folks peg a console's entire capability ceiling based on the performance of a single game or two. And a launch game no less, in this case. Yeah we're pretty far removed from the 32-bit days of needing literal years to see massive jumps (well, not really; Saturn had a massive jump in graphics only six months after its surprise release, but it started out rougher), but these systems aren't being maxed out on Day 1, either.
 

sircaw

Banned
Yer that 2060 does look a hell of a lot better than the xbox version.

Then again spiderman looks incredible so surely the xbox can improve it.

another reason is maybe Insomic games are just a tier above Ubisoft in that department.

Not wanting to through shade on Ubisoft but i don't rate them anywhere near the naughty dogs or sucker punches of this world, this is probably just that. A good studio, not a masterful one, or maybe i am being to harsh,
 
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Bryank75

Banned
Would it not make sense if raytraced reflections activated only when a character is moving at walking or slow running pace.
Then when in a car or swinging or traversing quickly, the raytracing could be limioted apart from on the car....

Not sure if that would work, it's just an idea.
 
Either way you are all giving into this prematurely - I already cited (in another thread) that Ubisoft has been known to on occasion launch poorly coded trash then gradually update post launch as needed - this specifically, was the case with Watch Dogs 1.

Crashes, freezing and bug's that made the game unplayable to many.

Also, many of these same issues have resurfaced for WD3 -as far as RT performance - wait until games launch (1st party game's in particular) that have been made natively to take advantage of the console specs in question - WD3 is not a good example and I believe RT was tacked on at last minute.
 
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