Crysis, a game that gave most modern PCs and consoles of the time a run for their money, has now accomplished something incredible in the remastered version. Crysis Remastered will be the first game to support ray tracing on the current PS4 and Xbox One consoles, even though neither of the two consoles are powerful enough to support ray tracing.
The trick, however, is that the game will produce ray traced images using software-based ray-tracing technology. Last year, Crytek impressed fans by showcasing a Neon Noin Tech demo, which was developed under a modified version of CryEngine 5.5. Although Crysis Remastered is now being acknowledged to have accomplished ray tracing on current-gen consoles, software-based ray tracing isn't remotely new. Recently, Nvidia added software-based ray tracing support for its GTX GPUs, but not only did these ray traced images look less impressive, the performance took a major hit in comparison to the newer RTX GPUs which feature hardware-based ray tracing.
To those who are hearing about ray tracing technology for the first time, it's basically a rendering technique that creates realistic shadows, reflections, and lighting in supported games. The feature is also a major aspect of the upcoming next-gen consoles – the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. All three of these consoles will be powered by AMD's RDNA 2 GPUs that support hardware-based ray tracing.
You can also learn more about how Crysis Remasted achieved ray tracing on PS4 and Xbox One by checking out Digital Foundry's technical analysis video.
Digital Foundry's breakdown explains that even though achieving ray tracing on Xbox One and PS4 Pro is commendable, it isn't how fans will want to play the game. With ray tracing turned off, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X can run the game at 1800p and 2160p, respectively. However, enabling ray tracing causes the game to render at 1080p while dipping under 30fps.
Crysis Remastered is releasing on September 18 for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
