The GPU in the new PlayStation 5 Pro is typically old technology, but it gives a taste of the ray tracing upgrades coming with AMD’s new RDNA 4 graphics chips for PC gamers.
This is the low point of the same PS5 Pro in-depth investigation that also revealed that Sony went its own way with AI hardware in the console instead of employing AMD technology.
Sony’s lead architect for its PlayStation consoles, Mark Cerny, has explained that the GPU in the PS5 Pro is still RDNA 2-based at its core, just like the original PS5. The reason for that is straightforward, compatibility.
By largely porting the RDNA 2 generation to the PS5 Pro’s GPU shaders, game developers can compile a single code and have it run on the PS5 and PS5 Pro.
However, the PS5 Pro is identical. ” The main generation of the PS5 Pro is somewhere between RDNA 2 and RDNA 3,” explains Cerny. For starters, while the shaders are from RDNA 2, some parts of the geometry pipe come from RDNA 3.
These geometric pipes are faster but necessarily invisible to a game engine. You can use the same code on either console, but it will work best on the PS5 Pro.
However, if Sony had opted for, say, RDNA 3’s doubled floating-point math capability, this would require the compilation of two code paths, one for the PS5 and one for the PS5 Pro. This wasn’t a burden Sony was looking to place on game developers for what is a mid-life update rather than a new generation of consoles.
But from a PC gaming perspective, the most intriguing thing about the PS5 Pro’s GPU is ray tracing. Cerny says the updated ray tracing hardware comes from a “future generation of RDNA. “
Cerny isn’t specific, but it’s clear that this generation “appears first” on the PS5 Pro and is not available on any other AMD chips lately. Since we expect RDNA four to be replaced by an architecturally branded CDNA, only RDNA four remains.
Anyway, Cerny goes into details regarding the updates. You can watch the video to know all the details. But the short edition tries to duplicate the functionality of the BVH and add new stack control hardware.
The BVH performance boost gives broad-based improvements in ray-tracing performance, while the new stack management engine particularly helps with complex reflections.
So what effect does that have on performance?” It’s tricky to call an acceleration accurate because it depends largely on the specific characteristics of the use. But we generally find that the calculation of rays occurs at twice or three times that of the Playstation 5. ” says Cerny.
However, this feature build-up includes the effect of having a 67% larger and more complex GPU on the PS5 Pro compared to the PS5. Cerny believes this alone tends to translate into an increase in real-world functionality of about 45%.
So, bearing in mind Sony is claiming ray tracing is typically around 100% to 200% faster on the PS5 Pro, it’s clear that the bulk of that improvement is architectural rather than simply a consequence of adding 67% more functional units.
This bodes well for the four RDNA GPUs. AMD currently comfortably has the lowest ray tracing functionality of the most sensible 3 PC GPU vendors.
Intel’s new B580 GPU has pretty decent ray tracing throughput, but it’s Nvidia that’s in the lead. Based on the improved ray tracing in the PS5 Pro, we’d expect AMD to close most if perhaps not all of the gap to Nvidia.
Of course, Nvidia will have its own new GPU architecture arriving early in the new year alongside AMD’s RDNA 4. Known as Blackwell and likely to be branded RTX 50 series, it will no doubt bring its own ray tracing boost. Odds are, then, that AMD will remain at a clear disadvantage.
But hopefully, RDNA 4’s ray tracing will have improved sufficiently to make it more usable than that of existing RDNA 2 and RDNA graphics cards for the PC, where enabling high-quality ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077 can really hammer frame rates. Watch this space…
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Jeremy has been writing about generation and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google!) and loves nothing more than a serious thesis on the complexities of input lag and monitor overshoot, followed by a forensic lithography review complex. Or you just like machines that “ping!” » He also has a weakness for tennis and cars.
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