While speculation surrounding Sony’s next-generation console – the PS6 – has indicated that it might be capable of offering up to 10 times better performance in ray tracing than the PS5, industry insider KeplerL2 has noted that this won’t be the case. In a post on the NeoGAF forums, the leaker has said that this disparity comes down to a misunderstanding by Moore’s Law is Dead.
According to KeplerL2, the YouTuber is misinterpreting what it means for a chip to be, for example, 10 times more powerful than its predecessor, believing it to indicate that it would offer 300 frames per second on a 30 FPS game. This would be like comparing the same game running on an RTX 5090 with 200 FPS and believing that the PS6 would be more powerful than Nvidia’s current-generation flagship graphics card.
“I’ve explained this before, but [Moore’s Law is Dead] is misinterpreting AMD docs [with regards to] performance,” wrote the leaker. “He thinks if a slide says ‘Orion 10x RT perf vs [PS5’s chip] Oberon’, it means you can look at PS5 running a game at 30 FPS, multiply that by 10x and compare with 5090 doing, let’s say, 200 FPS, and conclude PS6 > 5090.”
In a further post, KeplerL2 explained the numbers by bringing in Ubisoft’s performance data for Assassin’s Creed Shadows across PS5, PS5 Pro, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and a PC running on an RTX 4080. Using this data, and assuming a 10x performance bump in ray tracing on the PS6, the industry insider noted that the difference would largely be seen in how quickly the console can generate frames, bringing it down from the PS5’s 5 milliseconds to 1.35 milliseconds.
This means that, while the PS5 is capable of an average frame rate of around 33.33 FPS, the PS6 will, in turn, be capable of around 103.3 FPS. This means that the real-world performance boost offered by the claims of it being “10x faster” results in around 3.10 times the frame rates. KeplerL2 has noted that more demanding ray tracing scenes, and even path-traced scenes, would see the difference be much higher. “But even in those cases, the raster/compute portion of the frame time is still generally over 50 percent, so a ’10x RT’ increase doesn’t reach anywhere near a 10x FPS increase,” they wrote.
Earlier this month, there had also been some speculation about Sony possibly using the PS6 handheld’s Canis APU to sell cheaper home console variant. However, KeplerL2 has noted that this is unlikely since it “would be a nightmare for devs.” They noted that the APU was designed with “specialized low power libraries,” which means that it also can’t be overclocked if provided with adequate cooling and power.
A more likely solution to this, they wrote, would be if Sony were to use a lower-power version of the Orion APU powering the PS6 home console to build a cheaper variant of the console. Through this, the company could also potentially save on its bill of materials, while also getting near-100 percent yields from the fabrication process.