Raytracing on the XBOX Series S is impressive | MVG

so we're only a few days out from the launch of the xbox series x and xbox series s on november the 10th which is only a few days away and the xbox series s continues to surprise me the hardware as we know has its limitations and we've covered many of these in my recent review as well as other people out there in the media and on youtube have also covered the series s and some of its limitations are quite well known now one feature that i was not able to cover in my review of the series s is ray tracing now the series s does support ray tracing out of the box but the feature seemed like something more of a soft feature in other words it's something that is a feature that could be put onto the box as something that is a part of the gpu but whether developers actually would utilize ray tracing on a 299 budget console is another story and what i mean by that is recently capcom had announced that the up-and-coming devil may cry special edition that's coming out for the series s and the x would support ray tracing on the series x but not on the series s and the team themselves came out and said devil may cry 5 special edition will not support ray tracing on the xbox series s now the ray tracing feature on the series s seems like something that would never be used due to its implications on processing power and memory usage when it comes to the series s we know it has a lower powered cpu we know the gpu is lower performing with four teraflops of compute and we also know of the limits of the ram space that is available on the series s and there's been a lot of conjecture and a lot of speculation that the series s may hold back the xbox series x and with the limits of the series as to perform at you know 1080p or maybe 1440p target resolutions for most games and hold a good frame rate then ray tracing seems like the obvious choice that would not make the cut for most games and it doesn't surprise me that capcom announced that devil may cry special edition would not have ray tracing for this reason and it's questionable whether any game would support ray tracing on the series s but that has all changed with the latest patch of watchdogs legion and this is the next generation patch that will release with the xbox series s and series s in a few days but here we are with ray tracing running on the xbox series s with watch dogs legion and i gotta say the effect looks very very good i mean this was something that has just kind of surprised me in many ways today going through this game and really just you know just sitting back and enjoying and taking a look and seeing how this tech actually works because i for one didn't really expect to see any ray tracing on the series s i know that there was an article by wccf tech a few weeks ago indicating that ray tracing would be a part of watchdog's legion for the series s but honestly i didn't really expect to see and here it is and i gotta say if you have pre-ordered a series s you're gonna be in for a treat because this game looks very impressive it is running at 1080p at 30 frames per second there is no 60 frames per second cap and that was never something that ubisoft was targeting and the array tracing obviously is baked into the game now there is no option in the game to disable the ray tracing on the xbox series s i'm not sure if the series x version does have a performance mode where you can maybe disable it but on the series s you definitely cannot it's kind of just baked into the game which is a little surprising because i do feel like a feature like ray tracing might be something that a person may want to disable instead i did see some reports on twitter that some people felt like the effect was probably a little too much and some of the road you know when it's raining it kind of looked more like mirrors versus true kind of rain type reflection but you know that is obviously up to interpretation i do think that ubisoft may have gone a little overboard with the effect really just to showcase that it's it's working on watchdog's legion on next generation but i do think it's a cool effect and look i i'm very much interested in seeing how this tech evolves over the next couple of years in this generation i do think that if watchdogs legion does have ray tracing then the future is bright for the series s i do expect to see more games start to utilize ray tracing it is unfortunate that devil may cry special edition will not have it but hopefully as we see more publishers and developers start to embrace ray tracing as a viable option on both the series x and the series x then hopefully we'll see more ray tracing games coming out because i do think the tech is really cool now i have to be the first one to tell you guys i'm not up with my ray tracing tech and some of the things that i'm seeing here i'm not sure what i'm actually looking at as far as if this is true ray tracing or if it's screen space reflections or maybe there's some cube mapping that's also been added but i did talk to john lennon and digital foundry over twitter and they did confirm that this is using ray tracing in some capacity and i will say that it's probably something you'll want to keep an eye out for because i'm sure that digital foundry will cover ray tracing with watch dogs legion on both the series s and x in a future episode on on their channel so definitely if you want to get the i guess the technical take on this stuff check out their channel but i mean i gotta say this effect looks really impressive and i think people that have pre-ordered the series s will be very very surprised at this i think for me this is you know this is just another one of those things that really just nullifies that argument that the xbox series s will hold back the xbox series x because we have games like watch dogs legion that do support ray tracing we have games like ori and the will of the wisps that do run at 4k at 60 frames there is definitely a lot of potential and a lot of untapped power on the series s and this is something i mean if this is the first game that is supporting ray tracing and it's a launch game for the series s then i think the sirius s is going to be in pretty good hands over the next couple of years and i would be feeling pretty good about my purchase if i did pre-order a series s and i think you know just rest easy that there is a lot of potential here and a lot going on and i definitely want to see a comparison with the series x and the series s so hopefully digital foundry will come out and make a really cool video and we'll get a lot more insight as to you know what exactly is going on here and how ubisoft have managed to pull this off but this was just a quick video for you guys i wanted to show you guys this because i think it's a really cool thing and let me know what you guys think about ray tracing on the xbox series s with watch dogs legion in the comments below i definitely want to hear what you guys have to say but as always guys if you like this video give me a thumbs up and i'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now you

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 297,278

Keywords: xbox, series s, xbo series s, xbox series x, raytracing, watch dogs legion, screen space reflections, ssr, cubemaps, reflections, mvg, modern vintage gamer, microsoft, xbox series s

Id: nyIB2J8fVSk

Length: 7min 53sec (473 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020