A notable insider has revealed a list of potential ray tracing upgrades for AMD's RDNA 4 graphics cards, which may also be present within the PS5 Pro. The heavily rumored mid-generation refresh for the PlayStation 5 reportedly packs a significant improvement on the graphical front, and if this information is right, it might launch with cutting-edge features that can demonstrably enhance ray-traced visuals and performance in supported games.

The PS5 Pro's specs majorly leaked earlier this year via confidential documents retrieved from Sony's developer portal. According to the leaks, the PS5 Pro's biggest upgrade will be its much stronger 33.5-teraflop GPU (graphical processing unit) compared to the base PS5's 10.23-teraflop GPU, as well as a 10% faster CPU, faster system memory, and a new machine learning-based resolution upscaler dubbed PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. Additionally, the PS5 Pro's GPU supposedly makes the leap to AMD's current RDNA 3 architecture, which will naturally lead to efficiency and performance gains.

All of these GPU upgrades lead to a "2-3x" jump in the PS5 Pro's ray tracing capabilities compared to the vanilla PS5, as per the leaked documentation. However, it seems there's a lot more under the hood that allows the PS5 Pro to pull ahead in the ray tracing department, and some of it may come from AMD's in-development RDNA 4 GPU architecture. A new tweet from credible hardware insider Kepler_L2 potentially spills the beans on some major ray tracing features coming with RDNA 4 graphics cards for PCs. Surprisingly, the insider also claims that "most, if not all" of these features will be in the PS5 Pro as well.

Some of the new RT features coming with gfx12/RDNA4. Most if not all of these should be in the PS5 Pro too 🙂 pic.twitter.com/AO5HaxJlMK

— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) July 21, 2024

Double ray tracing intersect engine
RT instance node transform
64B RT node
Ray tracing tri pair optimization
Change flags encoded in barycentrics to simplify detection of procedural nodes
BVH footprint improvement
RT support for OBB and instance node intersection

The blacked-out rows are apparently "non-RT features," which the insider may have concealed to keep the focus on ray tracing upgrades. Nevertheless, the list reveals intriguing features and optimizations for RDNA 4. Kepler_L2 also alleged in a follow-up tweet that the PS5 Pro is built on a hybrid "RDNA 3.5 + RDNA4 RT/WMMA/Data Prefetcher" architecture, which essentially means the PS5 Pro's GPU will be based on a customized version of RDNA 3 and incorporate RDNA 4's ray tracing upgrades, as well as features like Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate and the new data prefetcher, which increases code size to 32 KB.

PlayStation has always worked very closely with AMD to design its consoles, and considering the current PS5's GPU was also built with similarly deep customization, Kepler_L2's information does appear plausible. Technical specifications aside, fans have been speculating when Sony might be planning to formally announce the PS5 Pro, with rumors currently pointing toward September's Tokyo Game Show and a subsequent launch in November 2024.

Posted: Jul 24, 2024 9:05 pm
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://gamerant.com/ps5-pro-rumor-rdna-4-features-ray-tracing/