The PlayStation 5 Pro could definitely offer up to four times the ray tracing performance of the base model claimed in leaked documents, as some of the system’s new ray tracing features will indeed bring considerable performance improvements.
During the latest episode of their weekly podcast, the tech experts at Digital Foundry took a look at some of the leaked new ray tracing features that will be included in the RDNA 4 architecture and will make their way onto the upcoming console, highlighting how some of them, such as double ray tracing intersect engine and BVH footprint improvement could indeed lead to much better performance. The former, for example, will improve the performance of the intersect engine that is used to repurpose texture units as ray tracing accelerators to do the smaller part of ray tracing, which is also the most expensive. The latter, on the other hand, should improve BHV compaction, which is used to reduce the memory footprint for what a developer needs to trace against. As of now, on PC, NVIDIA benefits more from BHV compaction, but this enhancement should improve things on AMD as well as on the PlayStation 5 Pro.
Unfortunately, this recent leak doesn’t go into any detail regarding specific hardware changes and does not make any mention of traversal, which is an important part of ray tracing. NVIDIA and Intel, for example, have hardware that takes over the traversal aspect of shooting a ray through the BVH structure, which is something extremely expensive and that is notoriously bad on a “normal” GPU. A patent from Sony a while back revealed a traversal unit that has yet to surface in any PlayStation 5 Pro leak, so maybe the console will have new hardware that will further improve ray tracing quality.
However, if the system really lacks traversal acceleration, then path tracing may be too ambitious for it. Older games with path tracing, like Quake 2 RTX or even Minecraft, could definitely run on the system, but more modern titles, like games powered by Unreal Engine 5, never could, no matter how simple they are. Since games will still need to run on the base model, the scale of ambition of the PlayStation 5 Pro is certainly limited.
The PlayStation 5 Pro has yet to be officially revealed. If the system is indeed releasing before the end of the year, it will undoubtedly be finally announced within the next few weeks.
