It’s no longer a mystery whether Sony’s next-generation console will support ray tracing via software- or hardware-based means. In today’s Wired exclusive, chief PlayStation 5 architect Mark Cerny confirmed that it would be the latter, setting aside fears of a rudimentary, “software-level fix.”
Cerny didn’t go into any specifics, but it does imply that whatever GPU AMD has cooked up for the PS5 should be pretty special. The article also provides new details on the console’s heavily hyped SSD, which will allow for quicker, more fine-grained game installations, as well as a revamped, livelier UI.
“There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware,” he says, “which I believe is the statement that people were looking for.” (A belief born out by my own Twitter mentions, which for a couple of weeks in April made a graphics-rendering technique seem like the only thing the internet had ever cared about.)