Devil May Cry 5 won't support ray tracing on Xbox Series S

Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition won't support ray tracing on the Xbox Series S, Capcom recently confirmed.

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Capcom dials back expectations for Devil May Cry 5's next-gen performance on the Xbox Series S console. According to the devs, DMC5SE won't have ray-traced visuals and reflections when playing on the lesser-powered Xbox Series S. Ray tracing will enabled via a post-release patch download on Xbox consoles. Capcom previously confirmed the new DMC re-release would support the following performance on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5:

• 1080p 60FPS with RT on
• 4K 30FPS with RT on
• 4K 60FPS with RT off
• Up to 120FPS with RT off

The developers have yet to detail the kind of performance Xbox Series S owners can expect. Now that ray tracing has been omitted, we should at least see 1080p 60FPS as a baseline, possibly even 1440p 60FPS that's upscaled for 4K UHDTVs.

Ray tracing being cut makes a lot of sense. It's not that the Series S isn't technically capable of supporting ray tracing, especially since it runs on a 7nm RDNA 2.0 GPU from AMD alongside new DirectX 12 Ultimate APIs, but there's a big power gap between Microsoft's two systems.

The Xbox Series S is much, much weaker than the Xbox Series X insofar as GPU power. The digital-only Series S only has a 4TFLOP Navi RDNA 2.0 GPU with 20CUs, making it 66% weaker than the Xbox Series X. Microsoft's next-gen enthusiast Series X features a 12 TFLOP GPU with 56CUs capable of hitting native 4K 60FPS and even 120FPS gaming.

This could be the first of many announcements of missing features on Xbox Series S versions of games.

The Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition releases November 12, 2020 for $39.99 on both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S consoles. The special edition isn't coming to PC.