Sony claims that the brand new AMD GPU within the PS5 Professional has ray tracing capabilities that aren’t present in AMD’s present PC graphics playing cards, implying that the brand new console has not less than a number of the new RDNA 4 GPU structure in its innards. AMD’s present GPUs are all based mostly on the corporate’s present RDNA 3 GPU structure, and it appears as if the brand new PlayStation has overwhelmed the PC to AMD’s next-gen ray tracing tech.
When you can definitely discover a number of the newest AMD GPUs among the many greatest graphics card fashions proper now, we’ve discovered that they wrestle with ray tracing when in comparison with their Nvidia counterparts. Nevertheless, AMD RDNA 4 ray tracing has lengthy been rumored to take a special method, doubtlessly enabling AMD to meet up with Nvidia.
AMD hasn’t revealed all of the tech specs of the customized GPU it’s made for the PS5 Professional, nevertheless it appears very very similar to it makes use of AMD ray tracing tech that isn’t discovered on any of its present PC GPUs. In a dialog with Cnet, Sony’s lead PlayStation system architect, Mark Cerny, claimed that the brand new console “makes use of the brand new superior [ray tracing] characteristic units that AMD created as the subsequent step of their roadmap structure.”
Crucially, Cerny additionally added that “when you go searching, there are not any different AMD GPUs that use it but. We motivated the event, and I’m very completely satisfied we did so – the response from the builders has been terribly nice.” Meaning the PS5 Professional has extra superior ray tracing options than any of AMD’s present GPUs.
So what’s inside this GPU? Sony claims that it has 67% extra compute items than the unique PS5 Professional, which has 36 compute items. A fast calculation exhibits this implies we’re 60 compute items on the PS5 Professional. It’s not recognized which AMD GPU structure is used for the remainder of the GPU, but when it’s RDNA 3, that may put the fundamental core on the identical stage because the Radeon RX 7800 XT. If it’s RDNA 2, it’s extra just like the Radeon RX 6800.
It might even be an RDNA 4 chip all through, though it’s additionally doable that AMD has made a hybrid design, combining an older core structure with newer RT cores. There isn’t an issue with the uncooked shader efficiency of AMD’s PC GPUs, in spite of everything – it’s solely ray tracing and AI upscaling the place Nvidia has the higher hand.
On the latter, Sony additionally says the PS5 Professional incorporates its personal AI upscaling tech, known as PlayStation Spectral Tremendous Decision (PSSR), which makes use of the GPU’s AI {hardware}. Comparatively, AMD’s FSR upscaling tech doesn’t use AI {hardware} in any respect, not like Nvidia DLSS, which makes use of the Tensor cores on its GeForce RTX GPUs.
Principally, it appears very very similar to Sony has needed to push AMD laborious to provide the PS5 Professional superior ray tracing efficiency earlier than AMD’s personal PC GPUs, and Sony then felt it needed to make its personal hardware-based AI upscaler, because it didn’t need to use FSR.
Both means, this exhibits that AMD genuinely does have some respectable ray tracing {hardware} at its disposal now, with Sony claiming the brand new console provides “double and even triple” the ray tracing efficiency in comparison with the unique PS5. Let’s hope that the brand new AMD RDNA 4 graphics playing cards additionally comprise this new ray tracing tech after they’re finally launched.
