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 Digital Foundry recently took advantage of this breakthrough to conduct a PS3 emulation test as well as 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.
Quake II RTX: Hitting 60 FPS With Some Compromises
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.
Portal with RTX: Playable, But At a Heavy Cost
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: Surprisingly Achieving 30 FPS
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 running 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.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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