PS5 and Xbox Series X could use the same AMD tech for photo-realistic graphics

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AMD just made a whole load of revelations on the CPU and GPU front at its Financial Analyst Day, and amongst all the big PC announcements, the firm hinted that the PS5 might use its next-gen RDNA 2 technology.

We already know that the Xbox Series X will make use of an RDNA 2-based GPU, and as spotted by Wccftech, during the Analyst Day, David Wang of the Radeon Technology Group implied that the tech would also be used in Sony’s next-gen console.

Wang said: “We have developed an all-new hardware-accelerated ray tracing architecture as part of RDNA 2. It is a common architecture used in the next-generation game consoles.

“With that, you will greatly simplify the content development – developers can develop on one platform and easily port it to the other platform. This will definitely help speed up the adoption [of ray tracing].”

Note that the plural of ‘consoles’ is used, suggesting that both the next-gen Xbox and PlayStation will make use of AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture.

Port for thought

The fact that Wang talks about porting from one platform to the other – presumably meaning across both consoles, given the context of the statement – further reinforces the suggestion of the PS5 coming with RDNA 2 running through its GPU veins.

Although we still have to be rather careful here, of course, because this is far from confirmation.

Unlike Microsoft, Sony has still yet to confirm exactly what implementation of hardware-accelerated ray tracing it will use with the PS5, which has led to plenty of speculation in various corners of the web, as you can imagine. We do, of course, know for sure that both consoles will support ray-traced graphics – it’s just a matter of precisely how that support will be delivered in the PlayStation’s case.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).