PlayStation 5 First Wave of Games Shows Developers Experimenting With Ray Tracing Features, Analysis Suggests

Last week's look at the first PlayStation 5 games was impressive, and it has shown that developers are experimenting with ray tracing features, according to a new assay.

Digital Foundry released today a brand new video that takes an in-depth wait at the next-gen games that take been shown last calendar week during the Future of Gaming digital event, breaking down the ray tracing features and highlighting how they are being used to achieve improved visual quality without sacrificing performance and resolution.

The nearly impressive PlayStation v game shown last week, in regards to ray tracing, is Capcom's Pragmata, which uses two types of ray tracing - ray traced reflections and a form of ray traced global illumination.

The second ray tracing event in this trailer is fifty-fifty more than interesting and takes the class of some form of ray traced global illumination, with some subtle but remarkable effects equally calorie-free bounces effectually the scene. As the astronaut character walks in front of a yellowish taxi, bounced light from the vehicle is seen on the astronaut'south suit. As it lifts its manus, you tin can fifty-fifty see an indirect shadow in the bounced light from their arm across the chest - it'south a remarkable level of fidelity. There are some artefacts though: if you lookout man the footage, you lot will notice how this indirect lighting on characters is specially grainy, as if the light is made up of tiny stippled points. This is mostly how existent-fourth dimension ray tracing looks when it is not aggressively denoised. Certainly, on early footage, I don't mind seeing artefacts and lower levels of precision - information technology just adds to the authenticity.

At the end of the day, the PlayStation 5 showcase was definitely a skilful i, as it showed how developers aren't just going to use the more powerful GPU just for improved performance and resolution, as the footage shows how they are experimenting with ray tracing furnishings.

From my perspective, the good news is that the PS5 software showcase demonstrated that game-makers aren't ignoring the new hardware and cyberbanking the more than obvious performance wins from a more powerful GPU - they're experimenting with RT features in the here and now, and information technology looks like we may see some of the fruits of their labour at launch.

The PlayStation five console launches later this yr worldwide.