PS5 Pro can 'technically do path tracing' confirms War Thunder developer

In a recent interview with Gaijin Entertainment, the studio's lead programmer revealed the PS5 Pro is "technically" capable of path tracing, the rendering algorithm that produces the most realistic lighting accuracy.

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For those who don't know, there is quite a big difference between normal ray tracing and path tracing, while sounding similar the technologies produce vastly different results, and require different levels of rendering hardware. Ray tracing only traces rays of light for specific effects, such as reflection, refraction, or shadows, while path tracing traces hundreds of thousands of rays per pixel that bounce randomly around a scene. Ultimately, path tracing produces much higher quality lighting in-game, but is costly in terms of GPU horsepower.

Currently, path tracing is exclusive to PC gaming, as the feature can only be used by high-end GPUs that have the rendering power, e.g NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080/5090. The exclusivity of path tracing to PC is purely based on the performance requirement, meaning consoles are technically capable of using the rendering technique, but currently the performance hit would be so severe it wouldn't be worth enabling it.

László Perneky, the lead programmer at Gaijin Entertainment, the developer of War Thunder and the Dagor Engine, sat down with WCCFTech where path tracing on console was discussed.

"Technically, it could; the only question is with performance. It is a decision for the future, though. First, we focus on releasing RT support for consoles, with all the effects except PTGI (hopefully very soon). Then, we will have a better picture of how much GPU budget we have to include PTGI and if we can make changes to it to fit that budget," said Perneky

"One difficulty in answering your question is that there are so many strategies for doing ray tracing or path tracing. Just to give an example, the engine that drives Alan Wake 2 is very, very different from the engine that drives Cyberpunk 2077. I really hesitate to say that PlayStation 5 Pro can or can't do path tracing, but you need to have a highly optimized strategy for doing it if you're going to do it on PS5 Pro," added Perneky