Leaker says next-gen consoles are forging ahead with ray tracing, but true RT is 2 decades away

A well-known leaker has chipped in to let us know that the next-gen consoles have a lot of nifty tech in store to facilitate better, smoother-running ray tracing - but that a full implementation of RT is still a long, long way out (unsurprisingly).

This came about thanks to a thread on X which was initially about NVIDIA's RTX Hair technology - for more realistic hair rendering (yes, it still sounds like an April Fool to me, but it isn't, in case there's any doubt) - but the discussion turned to the subject of ray tracing.

Specifically, LeviathanGamer - a well-informed enthusiast with a "passion for how computer architectures work and how video games use them" - started discussing the PS6 and next-gen Xbox and how both are targeting support for path tracing. They noted that AMD is "lagging behind" with this endeavor, before listing the biggest steps forward that Team Red could take in terms of tech that'd bring in better performance for RT.

LeviathanGamer notes that fast matrix math is the largest piece of the puzzle, but that this is already almost in place, and that "RDNA 4 has made 90% (of) the groundwork already" in that regard. Then they list the advancements AMD should be focusing on (in their opinion), which are as follows: 2x Intersection Testing, Unifying the LDS/L0 Cache, Dedicated Stack Management and Traversal HW, Coherency Sorting HW, 3-coordinate Decompression Geometry HW.

That's where the regular leaker mentioned at the outset, Kepler L2, chimes in, not on X, but on the Neogaf forums where the post from LeviathanGamer was reproduced.

Kepler informs us that AMD "has all of that (tech) and a lot more" which sounds like a promising statement regarding the ray tracing capabilities of the PS6 and next Xbox (which are both running with AMD GPUs, of course).

Full-on ray tracing isn't happening until gone 2040?

Interestingly, though, Kepler is asked a follow-up question by another Neogaf forum denizen, Jaguar Victory: "How do you see the state of Ray Tracing on the next gen consoles? Is it finally going to be implementable without major compromises?"

Kepler replied: "We're like 2 decades away from 'no compromises RT.'"

So, if you were thinking that a full bells-and-whistles implementation of ray tracing was coming to consoles in the remotely near future, you were wrong, apparently. Maybe you weren't thinking that anyway - but still, Kepler's prediction feels like it's on the pessimistic side. That said, a lot of judging the comment is based on what exactly their definition of 'no compromises' is.

Sony is certainly working hard to ramp up ray tracing for the PS6, with major leaps in performance expected - more so than with rasterization. Kepler's initial comment - about how AMD is all over this, and more besides - backs this up.