The PlayStation 6 and next-generation Xbox systems will feature plenty of tech that will improve ray tracing performance, but it will be decades until we will finally be able to experience ray tracing without compromises.
Commenting on NVIDIA's RTX Hair technology on X, tech-savvy user LeviathanGamer posted a list of tech they think would vastly improve ray tracing performance, including fast Matrix Math, for which RDNA4 architecture laid a lot of groundwork, 2x Intersection Testing, unified LDS/L0 Cache, Dedicated Stack Management and Traversal HW, Coherency Sorting HW, and 3-coordinate decompression Geometry HW. Commenting on this list, well-known AMD leaker Kepler L2 said on the NeoGAF forums that the next AMD GPU architecture that will power the PlayStation 6 and next-generation Xbox will have all this tech, and a lot more, so significant ray tracing performance on consoles should be expected. However, all this tech is not going to allow for ray tracing without compromise, according to the leaker, who predicts something of the sort is around two decades away.
Delivering better ray tracing performance seems to be one of the areas Sony is focusing for its PlayStation 6, as the new generation system will reportedly deliver five to ten times the performance of the base current generation model. Rasterization performance, on the other hand, is said to improve by only two to three times, which may sound disappointing to some, but should be more than enough to allow the system to easily hit 4K resolution at 120 FPS gameplay while keeping costs down as much as possible, although it remains to be seen how much the new console will end up costing at launch amid price increases across the board in the video gaming space.
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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