PC Riding: A Comparison of Ray Tracing in Watch Dogs: Legion on Xbox Series X and RTX 3080
Last week, Ubisoft shared a video preview of the Xbox Series X version of Watch Dogs: Legion showing ray-tracing effects. Many have probably wondered if Microsoft’s new console will use ray tracing at the highest Ultra quality comparable to a PC. And we got this opportunity thanks to the presented comparison of recordings of similar moments of the game, made on a PC with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080.
Since the Xbox Series X frames are taken from compressed video, we cannot fully compare many parameters such as draw distance, shadow quality, and so on. However, the comparison gives an idea of the peculiarities of the implementation of reflections based on ray tracing in the console version of the game compared to the PC.
From the looks of it, the Xbox Series X uses ray tracing effects comparable to Medium quality on PC. As a result, reflections on the Xbox Series X version are more blurry than reflections on PC. What’s more, the Xbox Series X even lacks numerous reflections. At the 0:45 mark, you can clearly see that the metal road sign does not reflect the environment in the console version of the project, although there are reflections on the PC. Likewise, the metal statue (2:29 mark) does not reflect its environment in the Xbox Series X version.
Such metal surfaces behave similarly on a PC using medium trace quality settings. Likewise, when using the Medium setting, the reflections become less detailed and blurry. So it’s safe to say that the Xbox Series X version uses ray tracing settings similar to the PC average. Moreover, it seems that in order to maintain a stable declared frequency of 30 frames / s, the game uses dynamic scaling, and does not display a picture in native 4K, but this cannot be unequivocally stated.
