Sony claims to have “motivated” AMD to develop “new advanced” ray tracing for PS5 Pro
Sony pushed AMD to deliver more advanced ray tracing – Mark Cerny claims
Sony has revealed their PlayStation 5 Pro console, and it is a powerful gaming machine. In fact, Sony claims that it is more advanced than any of AMD’s currently available Radeon GPUs. In that sense, the PS5 Pro is a cutting-edge gaming device, at least when it comes to ray tracing.
Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro features 67% more GPU compute units than the PlayStation 5, AI upscaling support, and faster GDDR6 memory. Regarding ray tracing, Sony claims that the PS5 Pro is 2-3x faster than the PlayStation 5. While some gains come from the system’s added GPU compute units, most come from GPU architectural enhancements for PS5 Pro.
Sony’s Mark Cerny has claimed that Sony “motivated” AMD to develop faster ray tracing units for PS5 Pro. These enhancements should also be coming to next-generation AMD GPUs. This means that PlayStation 5 Pro will launch with the most advanced Radeon GPU ever created.
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.
Sony’s new PlayStation 5 Pro wasn’t built with “off-the-shelf” AMD components. Sony guided the development of this console and used the most cutting-edge technology that AMD could deliver. After all, the PS5 Pro features custom AI compute (for PSSR) and what appears to be next-gen Radeon graphics.
That said, this system is still a PlayStation 5 offshoot, which has limited Sony’s ability to deliver the best that AMD can offer. PS5 Pro still uses AMD Zen 2 CPU cores, maintaining full compatibility with PlayStation 5 architecturally. Today, AMD has released CPUs with Zen 5 CPU cores, making the PS5 Pro’s CPU seem outdated. Regardless, it is worth remembering that Sony has built a PS5 Pro here, not a PlayStation 6. That limits the number of changes Sony can make without making game development a nightmare for PS5/PS5 Pro.
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