Sony confirms PS5 Pro ray-tracing comes from AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 Radeon hardware

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It's been one of the biggest gaming hardware stories of the week (and month): Sony has officially announced the existence of the PlayStation 5 Pro console while offering a quick look at the specs and features. While most of the community's feedback has been focused on the hefty $699 USD price tag, the beefed-up GPU does represent a big upgrade over the baseline PS5 hardware.

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Sony has confirmed that the GPU features 67% more Compute Units, faster memory, up to 45% improved performance, and two to three times the ray-tracing or RT performance. That last bit will be a proper generational upgrade compared to the RDNA 2.5 or the 'almost RDNA 3 hardware' inside the baseline PS5 console.

How Sony achieved this is pretty simple: the RT hardware inside the PlayStation 5 Pro comes from AMD's next-generation Radeon graphics hardware, or RDNA 4. This has been confirmed by Mark Cerny, Sony's lead PlayStation system architect.

"PS5 Pro uses the new advanced [ray tracing] feature sets that AMD created as the next step in their roadmap architecture," Mark Cerny told CNET. "But 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."

This statement is important because it confirms that Sony pushed AMD to improve its ray-tracing hardware, which has struggled to keep up with NVIDIA and GeForce RTX in the PC space. Thanks to the PlayStation 5 Pro, the next generation of Radeon graphics cards for PC will also include a massive 2X or 3X boost to RT performance - a game changer for Radeon.

• Read more: AMD's new SoC inside of the PS5 Pro: 60 CUs of GPU, faster GDDR6, PSSR, advanced ray tracing
• Read more: Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro official: 45% faster, 2-3x faster in RT, launches Nov 7 for $699
• Read more: PS5 Pro has a mode that improves the resolution and performance in over 8500 games
• Read more: PS5 Pro Enhanced games can offer 8K gaming mode, PSSR requires patch from developers