In terms of ray tracing (RT), the yet-to-be-announced half-generation console is set to outperform the base model that has been available for nearly four years (and has since undergone a model update).

In this week’s podcast, the editors of Digital Foundry discuss the leaked RT capabilities of AMD’s new architecture, RDNA 4. Given that the PlayStation 5 (and the Xbox Series) are AMD-based, it makes sense that the console update would bring some new graphics technology to the “half-gen” model. One innovation is the double raytracing intersect engine, the other is an improvement in the BVH footprint. Not to get too technical, in short: the former reuses texture units as raytracing accelerators for a smaller part of the raytracing, and is “the most expensive” in the available technology, and the latter improves BHV compression (less memory requirements), and is only seen on PCs today in Nvidia’s technology.

The leak does not detail the specific hardware changes, nor does it mention the important traversal in RT. Nvidia and Intel are using hardware that takes over the traversal aspect, i.e. shooting the ray through the BVH structure. This is pretty bad on a “normal” GPU and can be system intensive. A Sony patent recently showed a traversal unit, but so far there has been no mention of it in the PlayStation 5 Pro leaks. Perhaps new hardware will be included that could improve the quality of the RT even more.

However, if the system really lacks traversal acceleration, path tracing may be too ambitious. Quake 2 RTX or Minecraft, older games could easily run on the machine, but if something like Unreal Engine 5 is an option, it would be an impossible mission, and since all games have to run on the base PlayStation 5, the PlayStation 5 Pro’s hands are tied.

The announcement of the PlayStation 5 Pro is still a long way off, but rumors suggest that it could finally happen at a PlayStation Showcase in September.

Source: WCCFTech