Metro Exodus Developer Says Upcoming Sony and Microsoft Consoles Would Trade RayTracing

Robert Sole 19 February, 2019

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One of the developers of the Metro Exodus game has said that upcoming consoles from Sony and Microsoft would implement RayTracing.

Currently NVIDIA is being criticized for the launch of the new graphics with support for RayTracing. This technology could make its way to Microsoft's next console, according to some rumors. Now one of the developers of Metro Exodus fans this rumor, indicating that the next consoles, indeed, could support RayTracing technology. This would imply that AMD is actually working on supporting this new technology, most likely the Navi architecture. It will not be the same system as NVIDIA, possibly being an open source solution developed by Microsoft.

RayTracing on upcoming consoles?

Ben Archard has said that it would be hardware-feasible to implement RayTracing on upcoming Sony and Microsoft consoles. Archard has said that the PlayStation 5 and the next-gen Xbox would not use a system similar to the Turing architecture. It emphasizes that it would be the Stream Processors of the AMD GPUs who should do the computational calculations.

“In terms of the viability of RayTracing on next-gen consoles, the hardware doesn't have to be specifically GeForce RTX [RT Cores]. Those cores aren't the only thing that matters when it comes to RayTracing. It is a fixed function hardware that speeds up calculations specifically related to BVH intersection tests.

Those calculations can be done in standard computation if the computer cores are numerous and fast enough (which we think will be on next-gen consoles). In fact, any GPU running the DirectX 12 API will be able to "run" the DirectX RayTracing (DXR) API, as DXR is just an extension of the DirectX 12 API. "

Not an easy task

To make use of the DXR API and thus execute RayTracing, fairly powerful and fast memories will be needed. We know that future consoles will use GDDR6, like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX. This would only solve one part of the equation for using RayTracing.

This suggests that talking about 4K @ 60FPS resolutions is no longer enough to get good console sales. Users are becoming more and more demanding. Microsoft could be the first to use RayTracing on consoles to differentiate itself from Sony. We'll see if this Metro Exodus developer is right.