Sony claims that the new AMD GPU in the PS5 Pro has ray tracing capabilities that aren’t found in AMD’s current PC graphics cards, implying that the new console has at least some of the new RDNA 4 GPU architecture in its innards. AMD’s current GPUs are all based on the company’s current RDNA 3 GPU architecture, and it looks as though the new PlayStation has beaten the PC to AMD’s next-gen ray tracing tech.
While you can certainly find some of the latest AMD GPUs among the best graphics card models right now, we’ve found that they struggle with ray tracing when compared to their Nvidia counterparts. However, AMD RDNA 4 ray tracing has long been rumored to take a different approach, potentially enabling AMD to catch up with Nvidia.
AMD hasn’t revealed all the tech specs of the custom GPU it’s made for the PS5 Pro, but it looks very much like it uses AMD ray tracing tech that isn’t found on any of its current PC GPUs. In a conversation with Cnet, Sony’s lead PlayStation system architect, Mark Cerny, claimed that the new console “uses the new advanced [ray tracing] feature sets that AMD created as the next step in their roadmap architecture.”
Crucially, Cerny also added that “if you look around, there are no other AMD GPUs that use it yet. We motivated the development, and I’m very happy we did so – the response from the developers has been extraordinarily great.” That means the PS5 Pro has more advanced ray tracing features than any of AMD’s current GPUs.
So what’s inside this GPU? Sony claims that it has 67% more compute units than the original PS5 Pro, which has 36 compute units. A quick calculation shows this means we’re looking at 60 compute units on the PS5 Pro. It’s not known which AMD GPU architecture is used for the rest of the GPU, but if it’s RDNA 3, that would put the basic core on the same level as the Radeon RX 7800 XT. If it’s RDNA 2, it’s more like the Radeon RX 6800.
It may even be an RDNA 4 chip throughout, although it’s also possible that AMD has made a hybrid design, combining an older core architecture with newer RT cores. There isn’t a problem with the raw shader performance of AMD’s PC GPUs, after all – it’s only ray tracing and AI upscaling where Nvidia has the upper hand.
On the latter, Sony also says the PS5 Pro incorporates its own AI upscaling tech, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which uses the GPU’s AI hardware. Comparatively, AMD’s FSR upscaling tech doesn’t use AI hardware at all, unlike Nvidia DLSS, which uses the Tensor cores on its GeForce RTX GPUs.
Basically, it looks very much like Sony has had to push AMD hard to give the PS5 Pro superior ray tracing performance before AMD’s own PC GPUs, and Sony then felt it had to make its own hardware-based AI upscaler, as it didn’t want to use FSR.
Either way, this shows that AMD genuinely does have some decent ray tracing hardware at its disposal now, with Sony claiming the new console offers “double or even triple” the ray tracing performance compared to the original PS5. Let’s hope that the new AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards also contain this new ray tracing tech when they’re eventually released.
