It’s been easy to write off the PS5 Pro given its $700 price tag — even if that price is worth it for the hardware inside — but PC gamers have a new reason to pay attention to Sony’s console. According to Sony’s Mark Cerny, the chief architect behind the PS5 and PS5 Pro, the updated console features ray tracing tech that “no other AMD GPUs” use yet.
Cerny’s comment comes from an interview with CNET, where the engineer hinted at the hardware at work inside the PS5 Pro. Although Cerny didn’t make any commitments to a specific architecture, he says that the ray tracing features in the PS5 Pro were created as part of the next step in AMD’s road map, and that even GPUs as powerful as the RX 7900 XTX don’t have those features yet. It’s hard to say what those features are — Cerny didn’t — but it looks like Sony will have something of an exclusive on AMD’s next-gen ray tracing tech.
Even more interesting, Cerny says Sony “motivated the development” of this tech. That might be just some wishful thinking, as Cerny has said in the past that he believes Sony’s consoles have paved the way for PC gaming tech, but it’s an interesting note nonetheless.
Given that these features were part of AMD’s road map, Cerny is presumably talking about the ray tracing features that will be available in upcoming RDNA 4 GPUs. Although AMD has confirmed it’s working on these graphics cards, it has yet to provide a release date. Cerny’s wording is important, too. The engineer says that the PS5 Pro uses “new advanced ray tracing feature sets,” not that it’s packing new hardware.
Sony says the GPU inside the PS5 Pro is about 1.67x faster than that of the base PS5, but it hasn’t confirmed what architecture the graphics are using. The base PS5 uses the RDNA 2 architecture, which has significantly slower ray tracing performance than the latest RDNA 3 architecture. The RDNA 3 architecture, combined with some new features built for next-gen AMD graphics cards, could give Sony the bump in ray tracing that it’s claiming.
Although exciting for both PC and console gamers, ray tracing on consoles still isn’t practical in many cases. AMD is powering both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X, while Nvidia’s latest graphics cards dominate when it comes to ray tracing. Maybe the latest features from AMD will change that, but we won’t know until the PS5 Pro is here on November 7.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.