DF Direct Weekly #261: F1 25 PS5 Pro Path Tracing Demo, AC Black Flag Resynced, New Xbox Strategy

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:02)
Hello there, and a warm welcome of sorts to this, the 261st edition of DF Direct Weekly, our weekly show where we discuss the latest gaming and technology news. Joining me first of all, Alex Batalia. Hello.

**Alex Batalia** (0:17)
Yes, from a standing position. Surprise, surprise. But then maybe next week, I'll be back on the treadmill. You never know, I'm varying things up.

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:25)
That'd be good.
Excellent stuff. And hello, Tom Morgan.

**Tom Morgan** (0:31)
Hello. I am fully static this week.
No doom guy head bobbing for me, but yeah, glad to be here.

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:40)
Okay, brilliant stuff. But before we move on, quick shout out to the DF Supporter Program. Early access to every edition of DF Direct Weekly, high quality video downloads of everything. We do use updates from the team, completely ad-free access to digitalfoundry.net. Our website is pretty amazing stuff, so please do consider that, patreon.com/digitalfoundry.
But let's move on to our first news topic. Okay, so first news topic of the week. This one came out of nowhere and from a surprising source. We were all set to talk about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced as our lead story, but then Alex gained access to the GDC archive of talks from this year, and we found something that I think, Alex, it's quite extraordinary, isn't it?

**Alex Batalia** (1:23)
Yeah, it's hidden away in a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful presentation about F1 25's path tracing. It says F1 25 path tracing at 200 miles per hour. This was presented by Tom Hammersley of EA, Codemasters in this case, and it was all about the path tracing implementation in F1 25, specifically on PC. So there was a ton of really good information there, developed over one year with two senior engine programmers really fast. But the golden nugget was at the very end of the presentation, when going over performance numbers, and he specifically references the RX 9070 XT as being surprisingly okay at the path tracing, like roughly 30 Hz at 4K FSR3 quality mode. And said, like basically, okay, well, can this run on lower end stuff? And then he cues up a video of path tracing running on, dom dom dom, the PlayStation 5 Pro. You heard me right, PS5 Pro running F1 with path tracing.
And there's a, yeah, I mean, basically when the PS5 Pro came out, we probably didn't think about path tracing being anything really viable for that console. RDNA 3, RDNA 4, they're better at RT, but not super impressive always. And this is running on there. So there's two things. He throws up a slide after he shows off this quick video showcasing it running.
And basically, it's running internally at 1080p. It's being upscaled to 4K via PSSR. He doesn't say PSSR 1 or 2, but it really doesn't matter because they have a very similar frame time cost. It's running a daylight track, which is kind of important. I'll talk about that later.
And it's showing the original video that he just queued up was, he said 30 hertz, 30 FPS. So then this performance slide shows up and there is, we can see there's two columns. On the left is the game's standard path tracing implementation with, I would say, probably little microcode optimizations specifically tied to PS5 Pro architecture. It's just like a port from the PC version. And you can see that's running at 42.32 milliseconds. So that is actually quite a bit lower than 30 FPS. You know, 20 FPS is region. Wouldn't be good enough for real-time rendering, at least at 1080p internal resolution. But next to that is what I presume the video is based on. He doesn't actually directly say it. But EA Seed is the research organization, engineering research organization within EA. And they do a whole bunch of crazy stuff like machine learning research, path tracing research. That's where Gibbs came from. They're a real-time GI solution they use in all their sports games. And here is a different path tracer where the total frame time cost is 23.36 milliseconds, which is a little bit above 40 FPS, which he said was good enough for a 30 Hertz presentation, 30 FPS.
He also made his mention as part of this, I'm talking about it here, but this prototype work, there was zero promises at all that this will be shipping.
That's what we do. We always say things with big caveats at DF and so do developers. And yeah, so wasn't promised to be shipping in any version or any iteration of the game, although we does thank Mark Cerny at the end of the presentation. So I don't know. I kind of think this could be somewhere in the future personally. But this is fantastic.