YouTube channel Moore’s Law Is Dead recently made new claims about the performance of upcoming next-generation consoles, referencing alleged leaked internal AMD documents. While most analysts expect the PlayStation 6 to significantly improve ray tracing compared with the PlayStation 5, its overall effect on game performance remains uncertain.
The leaks suggest traditional rasterized performance could see a threefold increase, a relatively modest advancement compared with the larger gains between previous console generations. This smaller generational uplift supports claims from Sony and other manufacturers that rasterization performance is approaching its practical limits.
Meanwhile, the PS6 is rumored to deliver ray tracing throughput six to 12 times higher than its predecessor, prompting comparisons to Nvidia’s RTX 5090. However, notable leaker KeplerL2 rejects that framing, emphasizing that ray tracing metrics alone are not enough to judge total performance.
While the PS6 is rumored to complete per-frame ray tracing workloads in roughly one-fifth the time of the PS5, other rendering tasks, particularly rasterization, frequently have a greater impact on final performance. Consequently, total gains for the next-generation system may reach just above 300 percent, depending on the title.
Games with heavier ray tracing workloads could experience stronger gains, though likely not at a tenfold scale. Although consoles and PC GPUs are never directly equivalent, current information positions the RTX 4080 as the nearest PC-class comparison to the PS6.
Pricing remains another closely watched issue. Rising memory costs have pushed the standard PS5 to $650, while the PlayStation 5 Pro is now priced at $900. Although concerns of a $1,000 PS6 have emerged, Kepler suggests a $700 launch price is still feasible.
The console’s estimated bill of materials currently sits near $760, though Sony could choose to subsidize hardware costs and offset them through software revenue. To keep pricing below $800, the most practical cost reductions would likely come from storage capacity and removing the optical drive, potentially resulting in a digital-only PS6 with 1TB of storage.
However, a 1TB drive on the PS6 may prove less restrictive than it is on the PS5, with speculation indicating Sony, AMD, and Nvidia could adopt neural texture compression to lower storage and VRAM requirements for next-generation titles.
Current expectations place the console’s launch in late 2027 or early 2028.
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