Since last month, the possibilities of PlayStation 5 owners who did not update their console in a long time exploded with the release of a new Linux loader that allows these users to turn their console into a very capable PC . The tech experts at recently took advantage of this breakthrough to conduct a path tracing test on the system, which delivered some fascinating and unexpected results for a gaming system that was not designed for it.

The three titles tested - Quake II RTX , Portal with RTX , and Cyberpunk 2077 - represent different stages of path tracing on PC. Quake II RTX is the first major release using path tracing , and although old, path tracing breathes new life into the visuals; Portal with RTX was the first game to use NVIDIA's RTX Remix ; Cyberpunk 2077 , with its brutal RT Overdrive mode, represents the ultimate path tracing test.

Ultimately, all three games run on PlayStation 5 with path tracing, but the experience varies depending on the game.

In Quake II RTX's benchmark scenarios, at default settings and medium global illumination, the PlayStation 5 struggles to run Quake II RTX at native 4K resolution , barely achieving 10 FPS . Things get better with TAAU to 4K from 1080p (50% resolution scale), as the game runs at an average of 40 FPS , which is quite impressive for the system.

With Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS) , the PlayStation 5 can run the game at 60 FPS , although the lower bounds of the DRS range is 25% (540p) . However, it looks good enough that it would look like a credible release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

One interesting takeaway, looking at how Quake II RTX looks and runs on PlayStation 5, is that indie games without cutting-edge assets could definitely attempt to support path tracing on the system and deliver a good experience.

Low internal resolution being the absolute necessity to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the PlayStation 5 with path tracing is a recurring theme in the other two tests. Portal with RTX doesn't perform as well as Quake II RTX , which is expected, given that the game is more advanced than the classic FPS.

At 1080p output resolution , with TAAU from internal 540p , the game barely hits 30 FPS , and image quality is rather far from great with poor denoising , though an upscaler would have made things better in this regard. It is a neat experiment, but not something people would play, even though it run at a playable framerate, regardless of how it looks.

Cyberpunk 2077 , unsurprisingly, fared the worst out of the three tested games. To reach playable frame rates, the internal resolution had to be kept very, very low .

In RT Overdrive , at 1080p resolution and XeSS in Performance mode , the in-game benchmark ran at an average of 22.6 FPS , which is, all in all, a very respectable result for hardware not designed for path tracing.

However, by dropping resolution to 1920x800 (internal resolution 348p with XeSS Performance mode), the game does hit 26.9 FPS average , which is bumped to an average of 35.5 FPS (a 32% improvement ) by using the PT Optimized mod , which reduces ray bounce to 1 from 2 .

With AMD FSR 3.1 frame generation , the benchmark shows the game ru nning at 70 FPS , though the interpolated frames don't look correct, giving the impression that the game isn't really hitting those framerates. Still, the fact that it can run at a playable framerate is impressive by itself. It certainly looks bad due to low internal resolution and upscaling solutions, and frametimes are a little wobbly, but the fact that it does run on PS5 in some playable capacity suggests that the PlayStation 5 Pro could have attempted an experimental mode targeting 30 FPS with path-traced lighting.

As the Digital Foundry tech experts highlighted, with its better RT hardware and with PSSR , this test would have gone much differently on PlayStation 5 Pro , as the F1 25 path tracing demo showed during GDC 2026 . As such, with the PlayStation 6 set to deliver a significant leap in ray tracing performance and PSSR, it is very reasonable to expect next-gen games to support path tracing in some capacity, although mandatory handheld support could hold the system back.

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