The PlayStation 6 will sport significantly better ray tracing performance than the base PlayStation 5, a performance uplift in line with the current generation system's rasterization performance improvement over the PlayStation 4, which somehow signals a change in focus for the company.
During the latest episode of the Broken Silicon podcast, Moore's Law is Dead provided additional comments on last week's PlayStation 6 leaks, revealing that while specs may have been changed since that presentation, the fundamental idea behind the next-generation system hasn't changed. While the two to three times the PS5 rasterization performance estimation has been confirmed, Moore's Law is Dead provided some additional details on the system's ray tracing performance, saying that it will be five to ten times the current generation system ray tracing performance.
The rasterization and ray tracing performance uplift that the PlayStation 6 will deliver over that of its predecessor makes sense, according to the leaker. Rasterization performance has essentially been saturated, and with the PlayStation 5 already delivering framerates in the 80s range in some titles at 4K resolution, it makes sense to have a limited rasterization performance to hit a reasonable 4K, 120 FPS target for the most common TVs while keeping costs down and still offering a significant performance improvement where it matters more. James Prior, former AMD Senior Product Manager, agrees with this sentiment, as the focus has shifted from rasterization performance to other things like ray tracing and AI upscaling. Additionally, a 4K, 120 FPS capable machine capable of delivering RTX 4080, 5080 performance is going to be a very enticing proposition at anything below $900, especially considering some of the typical console advantages over PCs like smaller form factor, plug and play convenience, power draw and more and the fact that the system is never going to compete with gaming PCs, unlike what the next-generation Xbox could be doing with the flexibility offered by the Magnus APU. As such, Sony going the other way in a market with a "$1000 fatigue" with devices like smartphones and GPUs costing $1000 or more would be very interesting.
Going from what has been leaking online in the past few weeks, the next console generation promises to be extremely interesting in some unexpected ways. Hopefully, what the PlayStation 6 and next-generation Xbox will offer will be put to good use to deliver some truly next-gen experiences that could impress even those like Hideo Kojima who are feeling a sort of stagnation with games that look and play the same.
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