Insider Claims Gaming Consoles Won’t See Real Ray Tracing For Another 2 Decades

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Ray Tracing May Not Fully Mature Until PlayStation 7 or 8!

Story Highlight
  • Ray tracing is slowly making its way into every game, with path tracing also becoming popular.
  • An insider believes that consoles are still not ready for the technology.
  • The PS6 and next-gen Xbox should bring notable ray-tracing improvements, but these might not be enough for an uncompromised experience.

Both Xbox and PlayStation are hard at work on a new generation of hardware. Plans for the new consoles include handhelds and more capable home consoles, with both types of devices meant to delve further into technologies like ray tracing and AI.

However, ray tracing, in particular, has a long way to go. Even Nvidia’s latest graphics cards struggle with path tracing without the use of frame generation, so an insider believes consoles with full ray-tracing support are up to 20 years away.

Why it matters: Ray tracing is already supported on the PS5 and Xbox Series S|X, but these consoles require sacrifices to resolution and frame rate for the technology.

Ray tracing comparison in Cyberpunk 2077
Ray tracing comparison in Cyberpunk 2077

Recent discussions related to next-gen consoles led to the subject of path tracing becoming an important talking point.

Over on Neogaf, insider Kepler discussed a few features, like fast Matrix Math and 2x Intersection Testing, PlayStation and Xbox would implement in upcoming hardware to focus on full ray tracing for future titles.

He believes the PS6 and next-gen Xbox will be very capable, but they won’t necessarily offer full path-tracing support. In fact, Kepler believes that consoles are two decades away from ‘no compromises RT.’

This is something that even the $2000 GeForce RTX 5090 has yet to achieve, so the statement certainly makes sense.

GTA 6 Ray Tracing
Most Every Game Will Use Ray Tracing Moving Forward

Moreover, Nvidia is steadily introducing new ray tracing technologies like RTX Hair to address the more challenging parts of game rendering. These will slowly make their way to consoles as AMD catches up, so mainstream gamers will be waiting quite a while before ray tracing is available on affordable hardware in all its glory.

When do you think ray tracing will reach its full potential on consoles? Share your thoughts in the comments and on the Tech4Gamers Forums.

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