PS5 GPU specs may point to impressive ray tracing compared to Xbox Series X

PS5 and Xbox Series X may eventually adopt different ray tracing methods.

By now, you probably know the full hardware specifications of the PS5 and how they compare to the Xbox Series X. Differences in GPU capabilities between them may cause different priorities to appear during ray tracing.

In Mark Cerny's in-depth study of PS5 technology, the chief system architect didn't talk much about ray tracing. He confirmed that the PS5 GPU can provide hardware-accelerated ray tracing, but not through dedicated modules as seen today in Nvidia's RTX series. Just like the Xbox Series X, ray tracing supports computation units (CU) from the GPU itself.

Compared to the Xbox Series X, this is at a disadvantage due to the huge differences in CU between GPUs. Compared to the 52 CUs of the Xbox Series X, the PS5 has 36 CUs. Although PS5 GPUs have clock speed advantages, they are not enough to bridge the CU gap.

This may explain why Cerny prudently promised to do too much in ray tracing in his speech, but chose to give up possible uses such as global illumination and reflection without committing to full ray tracing.

Microsoft better demonstrated the capabilities of the Xbox Series X GPU by demonstrating the purest form of ray tracing (path tracing in Minecraft). Cerny makes no mention of variable-rate shading or AI and machine learning.

Obviously, this is not over, but the ray tracing feature set of the PS5 is not as powerful as the Xbox Series X.