A new video from Digital Foundry once again touches on the subject of the PS5 Pro, the mysterious new Sony console that has been talked about for several months now but which has yet to receive any official confirmation from the company, reporting that, based on the leaked specifications, it will probably be able to quadruple the performance seen so far in ray tracing, but that the use of path tracing will still remain complicated.
On the issue of ray tracing, the editorial staff of the British column substantially agrees with what has been reported so far by other sources, always based on what appear to be the leaked specifications of the new console model, however unofficial since there is no confirmation of its existence yet.
Considering the presence of intermediate elements that start from an AMD RDNA 3 base but contain RDNA 4 features, PS5 Pro should allow for great advantages especially in the ray tracing field.
Possible improvements and limitations
These should come from a dual intersect engine for ray tracing, which works as a sort of accelerator in managing the elements related to this graphic technology, while the BVH footprint should facilitate the work of developers in using this solution.
The problem, Digital Foundry claims, is that there is no mention, in the details leaked so far, of any new management in the “traversal”, that is, the movement and trajectory of the rays in the BVH structure.
For now, what has emerged seems to suggest the absence of hardware acceleration in terms of managing this aspect, which would make the use of path tracing, or true “complete” ray tracing, still quite difficult and ambitious.
Some older or simpler applications of this technology, like those seen in Quake 2 RTX or even Minecraft, might be possible for the PS5 Pro as it stands, but more modern games, perhaps based on recent engines like Unreal Engine 5, would make this quite difficult.
In any case, it should still be considered that these are still speculations based on nothing concrete, until Sony actually confirms the existence of the PS5 Pro.
