Some gamers are going full conspiracy theory over Pragmata's path tracing vs ray tracing debate, so I've donned my tin foil hat and taken a look

Capcom's new sci-fi hit, Pragmata, was released to glowing reviews late last week, and much praise has been heaped on its relatively excellent performance. That's with ray tracing enabled instead of the game's path tracing option, of course. Path tracing is known to be a resource hog, particularly in a game world covered in shadows and reflections.

However, some have pointed out that the difference in image quality between conventional ray tracing and full path tracing can be quite pronounced. This thread on the Radeon subreddit is one example, where some gamers are positing that the difference is so massive, it might be an attempt to make regular ray tracing look worse in order to make path tracing look better.

Is me getting insane or there are people celebrating this? from r/radeon

Or indeed, to make all forms of ray tracing (and therefore graphics cards capable of running it well) the defacto standard for a good-looking game, presumably in order to sell more GPUs. Or it's down to "lazy devs." There are a whole host of accusations bouncing around in here.

The thread references a YouTube video where clips of Pragmata are compared next to each other, running with ray tracing, path tracing, and conventional lighting. And yes, in certain areas, the difference between images appears to be quite considerable.

To test these differences out for myself, I jumped into Pragmata to grab some screenshots. I'm not very far into the game at this point (a honking great robot is impeding my progress, so I'll be looking at this guide later), but I've grabbed some comparisons from the early game areas so we can all take a look.

For the sake of keeping things simple, I've gone for a direct comparison between two path-traced images and their ray-traced equivalents, as it's no great surprise that turning RT off entirely lowers the shadows, lighting, and reflection quality. Or indeed, removes certain examples of those things entirely.

As you can see from the comparison above, there's actually a fair difference between the shadows in this dimly-lit scene. The path traced version shows much cleaner cut lines at the edge of the shadow geometry, along with some extra detail that really does help the game world look more "real".

Check out those papers in the top middle section of the screenshots. The standard ray traced versions look to be sitting almost flat with the floor, while the path-traced version adds a lot of shadowing, and thereby the illusion of considerable depth.

The tipped over cart is probably the biggest demonstration of path tracing versus ray tracing here. Not only are the shadows it casts on the floor much more well-defined, but the cart itself gains some highlights that give it more of a 3D effect.

I've captured my other comparison shots in a more brightly lit room, complete with some ray-traced reflections. Hugh and Diana's reflection on the back wall is a fair bit blurrier with standard ray tracing, and the path traced version even manages to pick up some netting draped over a crate on the opposite wall.

What's also interesting to note is the lighting on the crates over to the right hand side of the image, and the lighting of Hugh himself. His super-chonky spacesuit is a lot darker in the standard RT version, and there's a moodier tone to the scene overall.

I'd struggle to call the ray-traced version of either of these scenes ugly, though, or like they come from a different game. In fact, I've been playing Pragmata with path tracing turned off for performance reasons—and I'd say the "standard" ray tracing version looks pretty damn good overall.

Is ray tracing worse-looking than path tracing? Sure, absolutely. Do I feel like the art style was built with path tracing in mind? No, not really. It just helps with realistic lighting and reflections, as it's bloomin' supposed to.

And really, I think performance is likely to be the crux of the argument. At 4K Maximum settings, RT on, using an RTX 5070 Ti (with DLSS Balanced and 2x Frame Generation), the frame rate regularly bumps into the 144 Hz refresh rate limit of my monitor.

It's remarkably smooth to play at these settings, and the RTX 5070 Ti is not quite a fully-fledged, 4K-ready card. And as for the visuals? Yeah, it looks grand to me.

Turn on path tracing, though, and the frame rate drops into the mid 80s. Take frame generation out of the equation, and it's clear that Pragmata's path tracing demands are a bit too much for this card to handle. Here's hoping for massive path tracing performance improvements sometime soon, ey?

But the key question is, is this a conspiracy from Big Graphics Card™ to get gamers to upgrade to an expensive GPU? Personally, I really don't think so.

In Pragmata's case, I'd say the image differences are far more likely to be due to a relatively mild, performance-friendly implementation of ray tracing, with path tracing thrown in for the mega-GPU-ed amongst us.

Because, y'know, we all jump up and down when a game comes out with poor optimisation, and Capcom wants those glowing review scores. And while yes, the game can look noticeably better with path tracing turned on in some scenarios, I'd say it was still a bit of a stunner with regular ray tracing, too.

My advice? Keep the RT somewhere reasonable, forget about path tracing, and enjoy those extra frames. Now, where's my royalty check? That shadowy man in an overcoat did promise me a mega payoff, after all.