The PlayStation 5 Pro has been the subject of many rumors for some time, and the most recent concerns its ray tracing performance. Rumors state that Sony's new video game will have 4x more ray tracing performance than the current version, as corroborated by Digital Foundry experts this Monday (29).
Rumors suggest that the PS5 Pro will present a slight jump in raw CPU performance, but that it will still bring considerable improvements in other resources thanks to the RDNA 4 architecture. It is precisely this change that will bring a notable performance gain to the console's performance in ray tracing.
Commenting on the matter, the Digital Foundry team supported the leak and said that the PS5's leaked specifications indicate that it will support dual ray tracing intersection with improved BVH compression.
Practically speaking, dual ray tracing intersection will redirect the smallest portions of texture units for ray accelerators to handle. These units are the most complex to process, requiring a lot of computational power. Thus, the objective is to relieve the system as a whole, assigning the most complicated tasks to the accelerators for improved performance.
BVH compression reduces the amount of memory that devs need to track important resources for graphics optimization. Thus, with more free memory, it is possible to allocate more assets and process them much more efficiently in increasingly shorter times.
What about path tracing on PS5 Pro?
Despite commenting on these features and agreeing that they will be on the PlayStation 5 Pro, the Digital Foundry experts did not say anything about the video game's compatibility with path tracing.
And this is a point that has been generating a lot of anxiety among enthusiasts on duty. Newer games are already employing path tracing to render much more realistic scenes and lighting but at the expense of much more computing power. For this to be possible, the hardware must be compatible with Ray Traversal, an essential mechanism that never appeared in any PS5 Pro leak.
Therefore, despite the likely leap in performance in ray tracing, it is expected that the PlayStation 5 Pro will not go a step further and reach the market without the support for path tracing, something understandable, as the games must remain compatible with the PS5 Fat and Slim.
The PlayStation 5
Pro release date has not been officially revealed yet, but it is rumored to be
before the end of 2024.