The PlayStation 6 is said to deliver up to 10 times the ray tracing performance of the base PlayStation 5, but gamers shouldn't expect this massive performance uplift to deliver 10 times the FPS in games. According to known leaker KeplerL2, AMD documents are being significantly misinterpreted, and the overall real-world performance of the system should be, on average, in games that don't use much ray tracing, closer to 3 times that of the base PS5.
“I've explained this before but MLID (Moore's Law is Dead) is misinterpreting AMD docs,” the leaker said on the NeoGAF forums. “He thinks if a slide says 'Orion 10x RT perf vs Oberon' it means you can look at PS5 running a game at 30 FPS, multiply that by 10x and compare with 5090 doing let's say 200 FPS and conclude PS6 > 5090.”
Elaborating further on the performance the PlayStation 6 will deliver compared to the base system, KeplerL2 made a comparison based on Assassin's Creed Shadows using official data from Ubisoft.
| Task | PS5 Frame Time | PS6 Frame Time (Projected) |
| Screen Space Tracing | 0.54ms | 0.18ms |
| World Space Tracing | 1.38ms | 0.14ms |
| Lighting | 1.17ms | 0.39ms |
| Denoising | 1.91ms | 0.64ms |
| Total RT Tasks | 5.00ms | 1.35ms |
Although there is no performance data for everything else in the frame, the leaker notes that the base PS5 delivers a stable 30 FPS in the game's RT mode, making an estimate of around 25ms for everything else, which would be roughly 8.33ms on PlayStation 6. As such, ignoring the frame rate cap, the total frametime on PS5 would be around 30ms (~33.33 average FPS) and 9.68ms (~103.3 average FPS) on PS6, making the 10x RT performance increase a 3.10x increase in actual frame rates since there isn't a lot of ray tracing.
Although in games with more ray tracing and path tracing, the performance gap between the two systems would be bigger (and possibly make path tracing at 60 FPS a realistic prospect), the difference will never hit the 10x touted in the documents. “On titles with heavier RT or Path Tracing of course the gap would be much bigger, but even in those cases the raster/compute portion of the frametime is still generally over 50%, so a '10x RT' increase doesn't reach anywhere near a 10x FPS increase,” the leaker explained.
As the system has yet to be officially released, this early analysis likely only provides a rough overview of what the PlayStation 6 could deliver compared to the current generation system, at least at launch. Although the performance increase is still notable, it remains to be seen whether this alone will push PlayStation 5 owners to upgrade, especially amid rising prices for gaming hardware.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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