Agnostic2020
Member
there is overwhelming evidence that points to PS5 being RDNA 2 if you care to look in the right places.
First up is this slide from AMD, pay attention to the "SHADER" and "HARDWARE" points, as there's going to be some explanations below:
They mention that their current way of handling ray tracing on GCN and RDNA line of GPUs is through SHADER. In other words, there's no dedicated hardware to handle ray-tracing, so it is now handled through compute shaders to perform RT. This is what you'd call a software-based RT solution.
And this is where the Next Gen RDNA aka RDNA 2 comes in, with it bringing HARDWARE (or dedicated HW ACCELERATION) support as it indicates above. This is likely a similar HW technique to RTX's RT Core that's designed to perform/accelerate ray-tracing on dedicated cores instead of just relying on the shaders. This is what you'd call a hardware-based RT solution.
Now, many seem to have overlooked the recently released Crytek's Neon Noir ray-tracing benchmark that relies on compute shaders to do RT via DX11. This means it doesn't leverage DX12 DXR, or any of Nvidia's RT Core features to perform hardware ray-tracing. Its RT is purely software-based. To simplify it's specifically made to showcase RT on the "SHADER category" GPUs (GCN/RDNA1, etc.):
Crytek's Neon Noir demo: ray tracing without RTX analysed
www.eurogamer.net
Now let's take a look at the WIRED articles for a moment. When the first article came out in April of 2019, Mark Cerny made mention of RT support on PS5 surprising many of us and lead some people to assume what he said about PS5's RT implementation to be some sort of a "software-level fix" like all of the current non-RTX and RDNA 1/GCN GPUs already do via software (e.g. Neon Noir above).
To clear this confusion up - he made another statement, again, via WIRED in Oct. 2019:
His wording seems to suggest that "No, it's not a software-based RT solution because we've got dedicated ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware instead". Another clear hint pointing towards it being RDNA 2. Bear in mind that while all the current RDNA 1 GPUs that are out in the market currently can support RT (through software), they do not have any hardware acceleration to handle ray-tracing in the GPU, as you can see in the first slide.
Fast-forward to Jan 7th of this year. 5600 XT press briefing QnA and Sony CES 2020:
During the QnA session after the 5600 XT's briefing, AMD's Mithun Chandrasekhar can be heard saying: "Both the next-gen Xbox, as well as the next-gen PlayStation, both of them are going to be powered by Radeon, and both of them support hardware ray-tracing natively". Notice he uses the phrase "both of them", and "hardware ray-tracing" in one sentence. We got confirmation that XSX to be RDNA 2 now. So one down, just one more to go?
Keep in mind that this QnA was conducted two months ago, on Jan. 7th, back when we were still speculating that XSX would end up being RDNA 1 with features like RT and VRS borrowed from RDNA 2, just like we do now for the PS5. On Feb 24th, not only did we get the TERAFLOPS count, but we also got the confirmation of RDNA 2.
And on the same day at the Sony conference CES 2020, we again sort of get a confirmation and a hint that it's RDNA 2:
RDNA2 and RT for both next gen consoles, said AMD dude on january, they claim. I hope this "ps5 will not have rt / rdna2" nonsense ends
"
AMD AS A COMPANY…STRONGLY BELIEVES IN THE VALUE AND CAPABILITY OF RAYTRACING. RDNA 2, THE NEXT-GEN, WILL SUPPORT RAYTRACING. BOTH THE NEXT-GEN XBOX AND PLAYSTATION WILL SUPPORT HARDWARE RAYTRACING WITH RADEON NATIVELY. WE WILL BE SURE TO HAVE THE CONTENT THAT GAMERS CAN ACTUALLY USE TO RUN ON THOSE GPUS
WE BELIEVE IN OUR RAYTRACING, AND WE WILL HAVE IT WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT.
Mithun Chandrashekhar, Product Management Lead, AMD "
www.techquila.co.in
I m glad this has happened as it means more 3rd parties will use it .
Update :
Video of amd saying it :
First up is this slide from AMD, pay attention to the "SHADER" and "HARDWARE" points, as there's going to be some explanations below:
They mention that their current way of handling ray tracing on GCN and RDNA line of GPUs is through SHADER. In other words, there's no dedicated hardware to handle ray-tracing, so it is now handled through compute shaders to perform RT. This is what you'd call a software-based RT solution.
And this is where the Next Gen RDNA aka RDNA 2 comes in, with it bringing HARDWARE (or dedicated HW ACCELERATION) support as it indicates above. This is likely a similar HW technique to RTX's RT Core that's designed to perform/accelerate ray-tracing on dedicated cores instead of just relying on the shaders. This is what you'd call a hardware-based RT solution.
Now, many seem to have overlooked the recently released Crytek's Neon Noir ray-tracing benchmark that relies on compute shaders to do RT via DX11. This means it doesn't leverage DX12 DXR, or any of Nvidia's RT Core features to perform hardware ray-tracing. Its RT is purely software-based. To simplify it's specifically made to showcase RT on the "SHADER category" GPUs (GCN/RDNA1, etc.):
Crytek's Neon Noir demo: ray tracing without RTX analysed
www.eurogamer.net
Now let's take a look at the WIRED articles for a moment. When the first article came out in April of 2019, Mark Cerny made mention of RT support on PS5 surprising many of us and lead some people to assume what he said about PS5's RT implementation to be some sort of a "software-level fix" like all of the current non-RTX and RDNA 1/GCN GPUs already do via software (e.g. Neon Noir above).
To clear this confusion up - he made another statement, again, via WIRED in Oct. 2019:
His wording seems to suggest that "No, it's not a software-based RT solution because we've got dedicated ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware instead". Another clear hint pointing towards it being RDNA 2. Bear in mind that while all the current RDNA 1 GPUs that are out in the market currently can support RT (through software), they do not have any hardware acceleration to handle ray-tracing in the GPU, as you can see in the first slide.
Fast-forward to Jan 7th of this year. 5600 XT press briefing QnA and Sony CES 2020:
During the QnA session after the 5600 XT's briefing, AMD's Mithun Chandrasekhar can be heard saying: "Both the next-gen Xbox, as well as the next-gen PlayStation, both of them are going to be powered by Radeon, and both of them support hardware ray-tracing natively". Notice he uses the phrase "both of them", and "hardware ray-tracing" in one sentence. We got confirmation that XSX to be RDNA 2 now. So one down, just one more to go?
Keep in mind that this QnA was conducted two months ago, on Jan. 7th, back when we were still speculating that XSX would end up being RDNA 1 with features like RT and VRS borrowed from RDNA 2, just like we do now for the PS5. On Feb 24th, not only did we get the TERAFLOPS count, but we also got the confirmation of RDNA 2.
And on the same day at the Sony conference CES 2020, we again sort of get a confirmation and a hint that it's RDNA 2:
RDNA2 and RT for both next gen consoles, said AMD dude on january, they claim. I hope this "ps5 will not have rt / rdna2" nonsense ends
"
AMD AS A COMPANY…STRONGLY BELIEVES IN THE VALUE AND CAPABILITY OF RAYTRACING. RDNA 2, THE NEXT-GEN, WILL SUPPORT RAYTRACING. BOTH THE NEXT-GEN XBOX AND PLAYSTATION WILL SUPPORT HARDWARE RAYTRACING WITH RADEON NATIVELY. WE WILL BE SURE TO HAVE THE CONTENT THAT GAMERS CAN ACTUALLY USE TO RUN ON THOSE GPUS
WE BELIEVE IN OUR RAYTRACING, AND WE WILL HAVE IT WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT.
Mithun Chandrashekhar, Product Management Lead, AMD "
AMD Ray Tracing Will Arrive "When The Time is Right" - Next-Gen Raytracing Addressed
AMD has said in a recent briefing that raytracing will arrive on their cards "when the time is right". Here's what that means.
www.techquila.co.in
I m glad this has happened as it means more 3rd parties will use it .
Update :
Video of amd saying it :
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