As if confirming the PS5 release date, controller details, SSD details and 4K Blu-ray drive wasn’t enough, the WIRED interview with Mark Cerny has also yielded another pearl of wisdom – the previously touted ray-tracing capabilities of the PS5 will in fact be hardware based, rather than software based.
As such this means that the PS5 hardware must be absolutely stonkingly powerful to support this processor intensive feature at a hardware level – something that even the most expensive PC GPU’s struggle with even now.
PS5 Hardware Ray-tracing Support Confirmed
You can read the full quote below:
Before they do, Cerny wants to clarify something. When we last discussed the forthcoming console, he spoke about its ability to support ray-tracing, a technique that can enable complex lighting and sound effects in 3D environments. Given the many questions he’s received since, he fears he may have been ambiguous about how the PS5 would accomplish this—and confirms that it’s not a software-level fix, which some had feared. “There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware,” he says, “which I believe is the statement that people were looking for.” (A belief born out by my own Twitter mentions, which for a couple of weeks in April made a graphics-rendering technique seem like the only thing the internet had ever cared about.)
Source: WIRED