In a recent interview, PS5 creator Mark Cerny said he was surprised by the rise two things that have long been fundamental on PC, ray tracing and pushing games at 60 frames per second.

Ray tracing started gaining ground on PC with the arrival of GeForce RTX 20 back in 2018, although this technology was already implemented in some games many years ago in titles such as Quake III Arena and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the latter thanks to the pressure that Intel tried to give the mentioned technology an accelerated CPU. 16 Intel Tigerton processors were used for the Quake Wars demo.

According to Cerny, the idea to support ray tracing on the PS5 it was a late decision, and he was convinced that this technology would not be used in games until the final stage of the console’s life cycle. I don’t really understand what made Černý think, but he himself admitted that he was surprised to see the widespread support for this technology, and almost since the launch of the console, he found several games with ray tracing on the PS5.

Ray tracing is a very demanding technology that enables realistically recreate the behavior of light in games, and this can be applied to reflections, direct and indirect lighting, shadows, ambient and caustic occlusion. It can improve the graphics quality a lot, but it has a very big impact on performance and the PS5 has enough power to work with it very limited.

I already explained this topic to you in this article, where we saw that both the PS5 and the Xbox Series They use very low quality ray tracing in games. It’s due to the architecture and limitations of its GPU, and it’s something that won’t improve until new consoles with more powerful GPUs and better architectures come out.

PS5 and 60 FPS, another surprise for Černý

The chief architect of the PS5 was also surprised by the deployment of 60 FPS in games. I was convinced, due to the life cycles that previous consoles went through, that there would be many more games that would be limited to 30 FPS, as this speed allows offers higher graphic qualitybut in the end the almost universal rule is that we must have 60 FPS, in their own words.

What actually happened was that by using a more powerful processor with higher IPC and the concurrence of quality and performance modes, it was possible to offer current generation consoles two options, playing at 30 FPS at a higher resolution, which we know as quality mode, or playing at 60 FPS at a much lower resolution, which would be performance mode. In both cases, it is most normal to resort to scaling or dynamic resolution.

60 FPS They have been a staple of computer games for decades, although it’s true that most games tend to be fun from 40 FPS, a speed at which we already see a significant difference compared to a fixed 30 FPS. For some, 60 FPS on PC is not enough, but the truth is that it is an unnecessary exaggeration, because at that frame rate per second, the fluidity is already really good.