When Sony announced the $700 PlayStation 5 Pro, it was easy to scoff at its super-high price (even if it is somehow still cheaper than the now $950 PS3 at launch, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator)

But perhaps we shouldn't dismiss the console out of hand: in an interview with CNET, Sony's Mark Cerny, chief architect of the PS5 and PS5 Pro, said that the high-end console will feature Ray, “which is not yet available on any other AMD GPU” tracing technology that “has not yet been adopted by other AMD GPUs

Cerny did not provide specific details about what will be on the PS5 Pro's AMD GPU He noted that new ray tracing technology has been created by AMD as part of its GPU roadmap and that the company's RX 9700 XTX unit does not yet feature this new ray tracing technology, whatever it is Without more information, it sure sounds like Sony is getting something unique and exclusive from AMD

According to the interview, Cerny stated that he was “eager to develop” this new technology From our reading, it seems that the main motivation was not only to improve graphics, but also to make it easier to port PS5 games to the PC At the same time he told CNET that Sony wants to “lead” future gaming trends This is a claim that Sarney has previously made about Sony's game consoles, and it is debatable

With regard to ray tracing, perhaps Cerny is talking about AMD's as yet unannounced RNDA 4 GPU, which is expected to target the mid-range segment of the GPU market Currently, the PS5 uses the RDNA 2 architecture, which is significantly slower than RDNA 3, which has been available since 2022

With a speedup of 167x over the standard PS5, and possibly RDNA 4, we could see significant performance gains in the Pro model; more details will be revealed when the PS5 Pro is officially launched on November 7

This news is interesting and may foreshadow how AMD plans to challenge Nvidia's current dominance of ray tracing However, the new price point may not be justifiable for most but the most technical gamers Even allowing for inflation and rising production costs, $700 is still a tough pill to swallow