Next Gen Playstation & Xbox to deploy different Ray Tracing Engine

It is already understood that Next gen Playstation (probably will be called PS5) and Xbox (Could it be Xbox 720?) will employ some sort of Ray Tracing engine on the hardware side. Since both the gaming consoles will use AMDs technology and will have Navi based RDNA GPUs, it was assumed they both will be having similar ray tracing technology.

However, Gizmodo has recently published a report that although both consoles will have ray tracing, but will have different technologies for implementation. No further details are shared.

So what can be so different? Ray tracing as shown by Nvidia, can be done through special hardware as seen on their RTX series GPUs or can be done using Compute Units, although that is the slow process.

AMD already has Radeon Pro render which uses GPUs compute units to ray trace. This is definitely a slow process but with clever implementation can be scaled to realtime level. This is evident in CryEngines recent ray tracing demo running on Vega 56 based GPU. This could be what Playstation 5 could be using.

Microsoft, on the other hand, was the first to standardize ray tracing in DirectX with Nvidia as a partner. Their current-gen hardware also sports DirectX implementation on Hardware-level i.e. none specific features are processed through compute units. This may also result in similar DirectX hardware implementation in GPU of their next-gen console. So the ray tracing feature could be similar to what Nvidia does with their RTX line.

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Abhishek

Abhishek is a Finance Professional and has worked in multiple MNCs. However, he is also an avid tech reader and tinkerer with over 20 years of experience. His passions include 3D animation and drawing Illustrations. His creations can be viewed at www.artstation.com/abhifx

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