Gamers who have been enjoying the latest generation of consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, may have noticed that some games run smoother than others. Despite the technical capabilities of these consoles to deliver 4K120 visuals, many games still struggle to achieve even a fraction of that performance. This raises the question: why are so many games on these powerful consoles falling short?
Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X boast ray tracing capabilities thanks to their AMD RDNA 2 architecture chipsets, known as Scarlett and Oberon, respectively. Ray tracing, a real-time lighting technique introduced in 2018, demands significant hardware resources, and modern games are pushing the three-year-old hardware to its limits. This console generation has been marked by compromises, forcing players to choose between visual fidelity and performance. Unfortunately, in many cases, a 30 frames per second (fps) framerate is the best that can be achieved, which often comes with a noticeable performance impact that diminishes the gaming experience.
