It’s been less than a day since the official announcement of the PS5 Pro console. The biggest news (largely a shock) was certainly Sony’s pricing choice, but when it came to the hardware features, they were mostly in line with the leaks.
As early as July 2023, insider Tom Henderson mentioned that the upgraded PlayStation 5 would feature ‘accelerated ray tracing’. This March, YouTube channel Moore’s Law Is Dead revealed from a leaked document that ray tracing performance could be twice or even thrice as fast as the original PlayStation 5, which was confirmed yesterday by Sony:
Advanced Ray Tracing: We’ve added even more powerful ray tracing that provides more dynamic reflection and refraction of light. This allows the rays to be cast at double, and at times triple, the speeds of the current PS5 console.
While the PS5 Pro GPU is mainly based on the RDNA 3 architecture, it will anticipate several ray tracing enhancements that won’t be seen until next year in AMD’s first RDNA 4 PC graphics cards, such as:
- Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine
- RT Instance Node Transform
- 64B RT Node
- Ray Tracing Tri-Pair Optimization
- Change flags encoded in barycentric to simplify the detection of procedural nodes
- BVH Footprint Improvement
- RT support for OBB and Instance Node Intersection
According to another leak, it may also include thread reordering to reduce data and execution divergence, similar to NVIDIA’s Shader Execution Reordering (introduced with the Ada Lovelace architecture) and Intel Arc’s Thread Sorting Unit.
Interestingly, PS5 Pro Lead System Architect Mark Cerny told CNET that Sony drove the development of these advanced ray tracing features at AMD.
PS5 Pro uses the new advanced ray tracing feature sets that AMD created as the next step in their roadmap architecture But if you look around, there are no other AMD GPUs that use it yet. We motivated the development, and I’m very happy we did so — the response from the developers has been extraordinarily great.
Indeed, while AMD GPUs compete well enough in rasterization, they’ve historically trailed behind NVIDIA in this area. RDNA 4 hardware, starting with the PS5 Pro this November, is looking to change all that at a time when more and more game developers are implementing ray tracing in their games. Of course, NVIDIA is unlikely to rest on its laurels and may well have something up its sleeves for the GeForce RTX 50 Series ‘Blackwell’ GPUs, whose design is expected to be finished this month for a tentative announcement at CES 2025.
