PlayStation 5 Pro specs suggest you may want to temper expectations

If you’re holding out for the PlayStation 5 Pro, or are thinking that you’ll upgrade when the time comes, you might want to temper your expectations.

While the console will of course be a step up from the base and the slim models, recent leaks and discussions are suggesting that the Pro might not be as powerful as we’d all like.

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This all comes from leaked documents that describe the inner components of the console, along with recent speculation from the folks over at Digital Foundry.

The leak centres on the new ray tracing features - a big part of this generation of consoles - and looks at the RDNA 4 architecture.

Digital Foundry have said that the double ray tracing intersect engine will certainly improve visuals and lead to better performance, but more than that might be a stretch.

Essentially, the new hardware would aim to reduce the memory footprint used when playing games, while also repurposing textures via ray tracing accelerators.

Unfortunately, the leak doesn’t mention anything about traversal, which is an integral part of ray tracing.

The rays need to shoot through a BVH structure and to drastically improve this aspect it would need to be done via hardware, which is expensive.

Even companies like NVIDIA and Intel are utilising new GPUs in order to accomplish this for PC, so for console it’s looking unlikely.

While Sony has patented a traversal unit that could help, it would cause a big disparity between performance on the PlayStation Pro and the PS5 base unit, making games even harder to develop.

It would be incredibly tough for developers to send out a game if they had to take both hardware models into account, so this advanced graphical technology is likely to be implemented in the next generation.

It’s worth taking a lot of this with a pinch of salt because until Sony announces the thing, it’s all guesswork, for now.