It’s been easy to write off the PS5 Pro given its $700 price tag — even if that price is worth it for the hardware inside — but PC gamers have a new reason to pay attention to Sony’s console. According to Sony’s Mark Cerny, the chief architect behind the PS5 and PS5 Pro, the updated console features ray tracing tech that “no other AMD GPUs” use yet.
Cerny’s comment comes from an interview with CNET, where the engineer hinted at the hardware at work inside the PS5 Pro. Although Cerny didn’t make any commitments to a specific architecture, he says that the ray tracing features in the PS5 Pro were created as part of the next step in AMD’s road map, and that even GPUs as powerful as the RX 7900 XTX don’t have those features yet. It’s hard to say what those features are — Cerny didn’t — but it looks like Sony will have something of an exclusive on AMD’s next-gen ray tracing tech.
Even more interesting, Cerny says Sony “motivated the development” of this tech. That might be just some wishful thinking, as Cerny has said in the past that he believes Sony’s consoles have paved the way for PC gaming tech, but it’s an interesting note nonetheless.
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Given that these features were part of AMD’s road map, Cerny is presumably talking about the ray tracing features that will be available in upcoming RDNA 4 GPUs. Although AMD has confirmed it’s working on these graphics cards, it has yet to provide a release date. Cerny’s wording is important, too. The engineer says that the PS5 Pro uses “new advanced ray tracing feature sets,” not that it’s packing new hardware.
Sony says the GPU inside the PS5 Pro is about 1.67x faster than that of the base PS5, but it hasn’t confirmed what architecture the graphics are using. The base PS5 uses the RDNA 2 architecture, which has significantly slower ray tracing performance than the latest RDNA 3 architecture. The RDNA 3 architecture, combined with some new features built for next-gen AMD graphics cards, could give Sony the bump in ray tracing that it’s claiming.
Although exciting for both PC and console gamers, ray tracing on consoles still isn’t practical in many cases. AMD is powering both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, while Nvidia’s latest graphics cards dominate when it comes to ray tracing. Maybe the latest features from AMD will change that, but we won’t know until the PS5 Pro is here on November 7.
