In recent days, leaked documents from AMD suggesting that the PlayStation 6 (PS6) would have ray tracing performance ten times that of the PS5 have taken social media by storm. However, the well-known insider, KeplerL2, published a technical analysis that has dashed the hopes of those expecting sky-high frame rates.
A big leap, but not so much for the PlayStation 6. Here’s why!
In a nutshell: The fact that the PS6 has 10 times more processing power for a specific task, such as the realistic calculation of lighting and reflections via ray tracing, does not in any way mean that your game will run at 10 times the frames per second.
To understand why there’s this difference, we need to look at how a console renders each frame. Imagine rendering a frame like a pizza: one slice is Ray Tracing, with shadows and reflections; another larger slice is rasterization, the raw rendering of objects; and another slice is AI and physics calculations.
Improving just the Ray Tracing slice by 10x on the PS6 shrinks that specific slice, but the other parts of the pizza still take time to be “cooked” by the hardware.
Using performance data from Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the analysis simulated the impact of this new hardware.
- On the PS5, ray tracing consumes about 5 milliseconds (ms) of frame time. The remaining tasks—which include world rendering, NPCs, and physics—consume about 25 ms. This results in a total of 30 ms, or about 33 FPS.
- On the PS6, with the promised advancements, the time spent on ray tracing would drop from 5 ms to just 1.35 ms. Even assuming the rest of the hardware also becomes 3x faster, the final result would be a total time of 9.68 ms per frame.
In practice, this would boost the game from 33 FPS to about 103 FPS. While this is an incredible gain of more than 3x compared to the current generation, it is far from the promise of “10x more performance” that marketing might suggest.
The insider points out that this difference occurs because current games still use Ray Tracing sparingly. The true utility of this massive power on the PS6 won’t be to deliver “1,000 FPS” in older games, but rather to enable the use of Path Tracing (Full Ray Tracing).
With this technology, all lighting in the scene is physically simulated. This is where the new hardware’s advantage will become clear, allowing the PlayStation 6 to deliver photo-realistic graphics with stability.
See also: The Last of Us Part 3 will have more immune people, reveals former developer
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Source: Reddit
