PlayStation 5 Pro Leaked Specs Hint at 4x Ray Tracing Power Boost Over Base Model

Tech experts from Digital Foundry revealed leaked PlayStation 5 Pro specs, suggesting a fourfold improvement in ray tracing performance.

4x Ray Tracing Performance Expected

In the most recent installment of their weekly podcast, the tech experts at Digital Foundry examined some of the newly leaked ray tracing features that will be included in the RDNA 4 architecture and included in the forthcoming console.

Bringing attention to the fact that some of these could, in fact, result in much-enhanced performance, such as the BVH footprint improvement and the double ray tracing intersect engine.

As an example, the former will make the intersect engine, which is used to repurpose texture units as ray tracing accelerators, perform better. This engine is responsible for the most expensive and tiny component of ray tracing. In contrast, the latter ought to enhance BHV compaction, which diminishes the memory footprint that a developer must account for when tracing.

AMD and PlayStation 5 Pro Enhancement

Currently, BHV compaction is more advantageous for NVIDIA on PC, but this update should make AMD and the PlayStation 5 Pro even better.

Tragically, the most recent leak omits crucial information on ray tracing—traversal—and provides no specifics about the updated hardware.

WCCFTECH shares that hardware from companies like NVIDIA and Intel, for instance, handles the traversal part of ray-casting over the BVH structure. This is a challenging and costly task that "normal" GPUs are known to struggle with.

Maybe the PlayStation 5 Pro will contain new hardware that will further increase ray tracing quality since a patent from Sony recently exposed a traversal unit that has not been leaked in any way.

If the system actually doesn't have traversal acceleration, though, path tracing might be asking too much.

Limitations of Newer Games

The system could run older path-tracing games like Minecraft or Quake 2 RTX with no problem, but newer games, even the most basic ones powered by Unreal Engine 5, would never run.

The PlayStation 5 Pro won't be able to accomplish much on a grand scale since games will still only work on the base model.