A list of prospective ray tracing enhancements for AMD's RDNA 4 graphics cards—which might be included in the PS5 Pro—has been made public by a prominent source. According to persistent rumours, the highly anticipated mid-generation refresh for the PlayStation 5 will bring about a major graphics upgrade. If this information is accurate, it may come with state-of-the-art capabilities that will boost ray-traced images and performance in compatible games.

The majority of the PS5 Pro's specifications were leaked earlier this year through private docs that were taken from Sony's developer portal. The 33.5 teraflop GPU (graphical processing unit), which is significantly more powerful than the 10.23 teraflop GPU found in the base PS5, along with a 10% faster CPU, faster system memory, and a brand-new machine learning-based resolution upscaler known as PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, are expected to be the main improvements on the PS5 Pro. Furthermore, it is said that the PS5 Pro's GPU adopts AMD's RDNA 3 architecture, which would inevitably result in increased efficiency and performance.

According to the leaked datasheet, all of these GPU enhancements result in a "2-3x" increase in the PS5 Pro's ray tracing capabilities over the base PS5. But there appears to be much more going on underneath that enables the PS5 Pro to outperform in terms of ray tracing, and some of that can be attributed to AMD's RDNA 4 GPU architecture, which is currently under development. According to a recent tweet from reliable hardware insider Kepler_L2, there may be some key ray tracing features revealed about the RDNA 4 graphics cards for PCs. Surprisingly, the insider also says that the PS5 Pro will have "most, if not all," of these features.

It appears that the rows that are blacked out are "non-RT features," which the insider may have hidden to maintain the emphasis on ray tracing enhancements. Still, the list shows several interesting RDNA 4 features and optimizations. In a subsequent tweet, Kepler_L2 further claimed that the PS5 Pro is constructed on a hybrid "RDNA 3.5 + RDNA4 RT/WMMA/Data Prefetcher" architecture. This basically means that the GPU of the PS5 Pro will be built on a modified version of RDNA 3 and will incorporate the enhanced ray tracing capabilities of RDNA 4 along with the new data prefetcher, which increases code size to 32 KB, and Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate.

In order to create its consoles, PlayStation has always collaborated closely with AMD, and Kepler_L2's information does seem credible given that the GPU in the current PS5 was also constructed with a comparable level of customization. Aside from the technical details, fans have been wondering when Sony intends to make the official PS5 Pro announcement. Current reports indicate September's Tokyo Game Show and a November 2024 release date.