With more and more rumours coming out that give us a hint of the kind of power that will be under the hood of next-gen consoles, a new comment courtesy of AMD insider KeplerL2 has given us a way to understand the console’s performance when compared to modern-day PC hardware. In a post on the NeoGAF forums, KeplerL2 has indicated that the hardware powering the PS6 will seemingly be equivalent to AMD’s current-gen Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card.
In his post, KeplerL2 also mentions some of the features that the GPU chips powering the PS6 will be capable of, including Dense Geometry Format that allows the console to pull of Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite-style graphical techniques at a hardware level, a Streaming Wave Coalescer that allows for out-of-order execution of programs, Workgroup Self-Launch which reduces the bottlenecks on the GPU and CPU slowing each other down, and improved raytracing cores.
For further context, KeplerL2 has compared the chip that will power the next generation Xbox console, codenamed Magnus, to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5080. He also noted that the Magnus GPU will not be capable of some of the features that the PS6 GPU can do. Ultimately, these features come down to the capabilities of AMD’s RDNA 5 GPU architecture, especially when compared to Nvidia’s current-gen Blackwell architecture.
A report from earlier this month had given us some hints about what kind of hardware we can expect from the next-gen PlayStation, as well as the rumoured handheld PlayStation. Generally speaking, both consoles seemingly make use of hardware that, in the PS6’s case, is more powerful than the PS5 and the PS5 Pro while also taking less power, indicating a jump in efficiency. The handheld PlayStation, on the other hand, will seemingly be equivalent to a base PS5 in terms of power, albeit with much lower energy requirements, with Sony aiming for the thing to run games on 15 watts.
A report from back in July had indicated that, while Microsoft has been making improvements to its D3D12 – DirectX 12 – graphical APIs, one of its biggest features – D3D12 Work Graphs – will not be supported by either the PS6 or the next-gen Xbox, at least when the consoles first come out. The feature, built to make GPU-driven rendering more efficient by using a better scheduler and supports technologies like Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite, is seemingly expected to get adopted by next-gen consoles later in their lives.
When the new consoles come out, the time is expected to be a “cross-generation” period for both PlayStation and Xbox. As such, both Sony and Microsoft will likely be focusing on releasing games on both the current-gen systems as well as next-gen consoles. The reports also indicated that graphics programming in game development doesn’t yet make use of tools like Work Graph, and wider adoption of the technology is expected to take quite a bit more time.
For more details about what we can expect from the next generation of PlayStation consoles, check out our report that indicates that Sony will once more go with 16 GB of RAM.
