The video game industry is located in front of a crossroads: on the one hand the expectations of the players, increasingly attracted to realistic graphics and cinematographic lighting, on the other the concrete limits of current hardware.
PlayStation 6 (but are we really ready?) And the next Xbox promise imposing technological jumps, but the road to a “perfect” ray tracing still appears long and complex.
Sony has chosen to focus everything on this technology for her future console, with estimated performance between five and ten times higher than PS5.
An improvement that, in comparison, resizes the progress envisaged for traditional branching, expected to a more modest +200%/ +300%. It is a clear signal of the market management: realistic lighting is now considered the business card of the top titles.
The forecasts speak of a fluid experience in 4K at 120fps, an objective already ambitious and more than satisfactory for the majority of players. A choice that also serves to contain costs: to push too forward would have led to remarkable economic risks, in an industry that struggles to keep launch prices affordable.
Behind these promises there is a mosaic of hardware innovations, AMD’s RDNA4 architecture has already introduced faster mathematical accelerators, but the next generations will go further: tests of the doubled intersections, more performing unified cache and even dedicated units for the geometric decompression with three coordinates.
Technical names that, translated, mean less bottle hills and greater efficiency in the heaviest calculations of the photojournalist rendering.
In fact, the experts in the sector invite caution: carefully simulate the light in real time requires exponential growth in calculation skills, well beyond how much the next hardware will be able to offer. In other words, future consoles will mark a huge advance, but not the final revolution.
For players, this means that the graphics will continue to evolve, but will remain compromised: resolution against frame installments, visual loyalty against performance.
Only in the most distant generational cycles can we really speak of “perfect graphics”, without artifices or shortcuts. For now, the new generation promises above all to reduce the gap between dream and reality, leaving the rest to the imagination (and marketing).