Unleashing Visual Brilliance: The Power of Ray Tracing in Fortnite on PS5 Pro

Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro is currently the most successful console available, so it’s only fitting that we see Fable’s Fortnite receive a substantial upgrade. The Pro offers enhanced rasterization performance that’s designed to effectively provide better resolutions compared to the original model, but that’s not the only transformative aspect. Instead, Fable utilizes its advanced hardware ray tracing capabilities in the game’s 60fps mode, delivering a significantly enhanced level of global illumination and reflections – and does so while maintaining nearly perfect performance. It’s also noteworthy that one of Sony’s ‘major three’ improvements isn’t always truly utilized. Fable opts for its own Temporal Super Resolution technology (TSR) instead of the Pro’s machine learning-driven PlayStation Spatial Super Resolution (PSSR).

This is quite a captivating choice, and I believe it emphasizes important features regarding how PSSR can, should, and certainly will be integrated into UE5 games. Fable has been developing TSR for quite some time – four years, if not longer – and through its research and updates, it has enhanced its quality while also lowering its cost through optimizations with minimal impact on overall quality. TSR is specifically designed for Fable’s engine and is fully integrated and responsively developed with all the various feedback within the engine. TSR operates as seamlessly as possible with the engine’s specific quirks, leading to generally competent image quality.

Fable’s choice to bypass PSSR for Fortnite is understandable. For one, PSSR may be more expensive from a computational perspective, and in a scenario where the game consistently runs at 60fps or 120fps, every millisecond is crucial. Additionally, TSR sidesteps issues that PSSR has, as demonstrated recently in Silent Hill 2 on PS5 Pro. I believe this might be something we frequently observe in the near future for titles using Unreal Engine 5 until PSSR has established itself as a viable option. In effect, with Fable sticking to TSR for its showcase title, a message is being conveyed from the engine’s creators to its numerous licensees.

So, TSR remains while resolutions rise. At one point, I measured a 1080p internal resolution with Fortnite running on PS5, compared to 1350p on Pro in the very same scene. That marks a 25 percent increase in base resolution but more like a 50 percent boost in overall pixel count. This is quite the resolution increase, which doesn’t quite align with the specification differences between PS5 and PS5 Pro, but it’s worth mentioning that for energy-saving purposes, the console versions of Fortnite limit the dynamic resolution scaling’s upper bounds… and it’s uncertain whether a similar limitation is applied at all on PS5 Pro. In practice, however, the difference is surprisingly minor because TSR applies to both, despite a seemingly vast gap in resolution. Pixel counts are not the story here.

Ray tracing is where things get interesting, as it exists in two types within Unreal Engine 5 – system-based and hardware-based. Hardware RT is not typically found on console UE5 titles, even though the famous Matrix Awakens demo does feature it, which may have led to the assumption it could be more broadly implemented. Since then, almost every UE5 title has launched with the lower quality system ray tracing instead. The fact that Fortnite on Pro incorporates hardware RT suggests to me that Fable doesn’t consider it to be a suitable fit for basic hardware, but rather designed for PS5 Pro as a simple upgrade. Indeed, if you look at Silent Hill 2 on Pro, hardware RT is present in the 30fps quality mode where it is absent on the standard PS5 version.

Regarding the differences, RT reflections are significantly enhanced. The engine now traces against triangles that define an object instead of the blobby signed distance fields utilized in system mode. Reflected trees genuinely reflect como trees instead of being oddly fragmented, as seen with traditional approximations. SDF LODs also exhibit pop-in with reflections, which does not occur with hardware Lumen on PS5 Pro. All elements appear stable and more consistent. The same applies to shadows from objects in reflections – they are blobby and complex in system mode, while tree shadows appear much more realistic in hardware mode. Moving objects like characters are incorporated into reflections as well, which are not present with system ray tracing. The most notable example being that your player character is not reflected on PS5 – but it is on Pro. Other dynamic elements such as moving vehicles and other players are also represented in reflections with hardware RT, but not in the software mode.