Xbox Series S vs ray tracing - the story so far. digitalfoundry checks out every RT supported title and discusses future prospects for ray-traced effects in upcoming titles:
The Xbox Series S is, on paper, every bit as feature-rich as the Series X. It's based on the same fundamental RAM, storage, CPU, and GPU technologies - which of course means that it is ray tracing capable. You can absolutely get RT acceleration on the system, just like any other RDNA 2-based hardware platform. In practice, it's a bit more complicated.
The RTGI train continues rolling with Fortnite. Late last year Epic's battle royale title was updated with Unreal Engine 5.1, and along with it came big upgrades to assets, foliage, and of course ray-tracing. On Series S, we're getting support for software Lumen RTGI - an RT solution that combines SDF-based ray-tracing alongside a screen-space GI technique to produce convincing real-time indirect lighting.
RTGI lends the game stable, true-to-life lighting, even on character models and in tough spots like the underside of bridges. It's a bit subtler than something like Fortnite, but it's still very effective. Reflections look great as well, adding detailed, perspective-correct reflections that would be very challenging to represent in real-time using other techniques. Series S takes a step back from the other console versions again here, though there aren't any obvious feature cuts.
The GI produces more subtle but appreciated improvements to lighting accuracy. Some of the light bleed that is present using rasterised lighting has been fixed, and light does have more realistic propagation through certain scenes. This is mostly evident on smaller bits of geometry, which can otherwise lack accurate bounce or exhibit odd shading.
Deliver Us The Moon also suffers from an unsatisfying RT implementation in my view. This indie space-based puzzle game uses RT shadows on console, in a hybrid implementation that blends ray-tracing based shadows with traditional shadowmaps and baked shadows. The RT shadows do look interesting, and are clean and detailed in a way that would be very challenging to represent with typical shadowmap techniques in real-time.
The final grouping consists of unique titles that have odd or novel RT implementations. Crysis Remastered leads this pack, with a software-based spin on RT reflections that actually debuted first on last-gen consoles. The ray-tracing looks decent in stills here, though it does tend to take a second or two to cohere after movement. Both RT range and coverage are pretty limited, but the results are surprisingly strong for software-based ray tracing.
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