In our latest tech-focused interview with Gaijin Entertainment, we asked the programmers behind the War Thunder game and the Dagor Engine whether Sony’s PS5 Pro can support the new path tracing global illumination technology recently introduced on PC with the game’s Leviathan update. Here’s their response:
László Perneky (Lead Programmer): Technically, it could; the only question is with performance. It is a decision for the future, though. First, we focus on releasing RT support for consoles, with all the effects except PTGI (hopefully very soon). Then, we will have a better picture of how much GPU budget we have to include PTGI and if we can make changes to it to fit that budget.
You might recall that about a year ago, we asked a similar question to PS5 Pro Lead System Architect Mark Cerny, who was very cautious about committing one way or another:
One difficulty in answering your question is that there are so many strategies for doing ray tracing or path tracing. Just to give an example, the engine that drives Alan Wake 2 is very, very different from the engine that drives Cyberpunk 2077. I really hesitate to say that PlayStation 5 Pro can or can’t do path tracing, but you need to have a highly optimized strategy for doing it if you’re going to do it on PS5 Pro.
To this day, no game has introduced path tracing support on PS5 Pro. War Thunder might be the best chance the console has to pull it off, since it is not a full-fledged path tracing but just PTGI. However, it is more likely that console users will have to wait for the PS6 to get proper path tracing support.
In the aforementioned interview with Gaijin, we also inquired about the Nintendo Switch 2 and whether there would be any port of War Thunder and/or Enlisted for the new console. Here’s what CEO Anton Yudintsev told us:
Anton Yudintsev (CEO: We’re always eager to be among the first to support new devices, so we’re definitely considering Switch 2 versions of our games. Unfortunately, right now we’re still waiting for the requested Switch 2 dev kits.
If a developer the size of Gaijin is still waiting for their Switch 2 devkits, it seems like the situation hasn’t improved much since our previous report on the devkits shortage in July. This is unfortunate, as many developers would be very eager to port their games to the highly successful console.