4K 60FPS. This was the big dream that many gamers had at the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The PlayStation 4 line and particularly the Xbox One X showed those gamers how great 4K, and 60 FPS, could be for the new generation of games. Now, we had the more powerful consoles to bring them all together.
Or at least, that’s what we all expected. As it turns out, both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X would not be living up to that dream, but for reasons that continue to frustrate gamers to this day.
As we now know, most AAAs not give gamers the choice of going with either quality or performance modes. As it seems, quality mode often also adds something that seems to have a huge performance cost; ray-tracing.
While there are many ways to explain this term technically, one can always remember the literal meaning. To accurately render lighting, games trace each individual ray of light to see where they go. This is also how lighting works in real life, so it’s an incredibly effective way of making a computer generated image look lifelike and realistic.
Ray tracing is actually an old technology. It’s what helped make the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park look so real audiences didn’t notice when the puppet velociraptors were getting swapped in with the CG velociraptors, in the famous pantry chase scene.
What’s happened today is that developers have been pushing ray-tracing on video games to the point that they need significant power, especially on consoles. And this is where gamers get upset; developers have widely decided that this performance cost is worth the hassle of making the public decide to use it.
For that reason, most AAA console games today make you choose to get the best graphics, often with ray-tracing, running at 30 FPS, or to prioritize performance for people who want 60 FPS or higher. One may even find some console gamers who dislike ray tracing as a result, but today there’s an interesting twist to that story.
As shared by Nintendo Patents Watch on Bluesky, three Nintendo patents have emerged that are all for ray-tracing. Without getting too deep into the weeds, just the fact that Nintendo filed new patents means a lot.
Nvidia themselves touted that the Switch 2 would be capable of ray-tracing, although it seems it hasn’t been seen in any current Switch 2 games yet. These are likely ray-tracing technologies and applications that Nintendo worked with Nvidia on, only for the Switch 2.
This means that Nintendo may already have the ability to make very realistic looking first party games on the Switch 2, and if Nvidia will share it, this technology can also enhance third party games on the platform. Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, Pokémon Legends Z-A, and even Metroid Prime 4: Beyond may not show us any ray-tracing application yet, but we may be seeing them in Nintendo’s games a few years down the line.
And when Nintendo chooses to finally bring them over, will they have us choose between quality and performance modes too? Knowing Nintendo, they will choose to make their own compromises for a singular experience that will make it so that gamers will just take what they get for what it is, and focus on just gaming.
