Sony confirms PS5 Pro uses next-gen ray tracing technology and that 'no other AMD GPUs have used it yet'

The ray-tracing technology and performance of the new Sony PS5 Pro is the most intriguing aspect from a PC gaming perspective. It's been rumoured for a long time that the PS5 Pro's RT hardware may be shared with AMD's upcoming RDNA4 GPU architecture.

Mark Cerny is the head of Sony's PlayStation. He has confirmed that the PS5 Pro uses RT hardware that is not currently available in any GPU. Sony was also "motivated" by AMD to create it.

Cerny says this. Cerny, speaking to CNET via Overclock3D, said that the "PS5 Pro utilizes the new advanced [ray-tracing] feature set AMD created as their next step in the roadmap architecture. If you look around, no other AMD GPUs have implemented it yet. We motivated the development and I'm glad we did. The response from the developers was extraordinarily good."

We're a bit sceptical about the idea that AMD only pushed Sony to do it, rather than Sony requesting that AMD put the IP into the PS5 Pro APU's updated APU.

The real interest in this debate is what it says about AMD's upcoming RDNA4 GPUs. Sony claims that the PS5 Pro is 2-3 times faster than the PS5 at ray-tracing. This sounds impressive, but wait.

The PS5 Pro boasts 1,67x the graphics computation units of the PS5. This alone would give you a raw RT performance boost of 1.67x. AMD claimed a 1.5x RT performance improvement when going from RDNA 2 (used by the PS5) to RDNA 3.

If the PS5 Pro were to use the same RDNA 3-style RT hardware as AMD’s existing Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, the calculation would be 1,67 x 1,5 = 2.5. On paper, the PS5 Pro's RDNA 3-style RT and the PS5 Pro's added functional units will give you a figure that is right in the middle of Sony's claimed RT performance boost range.

If you want to take a pessimistic view of all this, you can easily conclude that Sony's numbers don't make AMD's RT hardware look very exciting.

It also fits with existing rumours about the PS5 Pro's RT Implementation. It still does not have the same level of hardware acceleration features as Nvidia and Intel provide in their GPUs. You wouldn't expect RT to perform at the same level as Nvidia in the PS5 Pro.

This means that AMD's RDNA4 GPUs, when they arrive in the first quarter of next year, will not be able to close the ray tracing gap with Nvidia in any market segment where they are competing. This is disappointing if it's true, as RDNA 4 will be AMD’s third-generation GPUs with RT.