TECH TALK
Either that or Ubisoft felt it was more important to hit higher framerates on consoles and that the raytracing effects didn’t warrant the performance hit. It’s another slap in the face for fans of ray tracing, but not without reason. Testing the game with and without ray tracing, the visual gains are more subtle than you’d expect from the drop in performance. However, I’m not convinced that the consoles couldn’t have handled the RT workload.
Case in point: the RX 6600 XT only has 32 CUs and ray accelerators, with a 128-bit memory interface. That’s slower than any of the latest generation consoles, except for the Xbox Series S with 20 CUs/ RAs. The performance at higher resolutions with ray tracing enabled on the RX 6600 XT isn’t that bad. At 1080p ultra, it managed 100fps without DXR and 67fps with DXR. That’s imminently playable. Even at 1440p ultra with DXR, it averaged 52fps. 4K was a different matter—performance was 38fps without DXR and it tanked to 8fps with DXR. Oops!