Rumor mill: Leaks have painted a fairly clear picture of how the PlayStation 6 and next-gen Xbox might perform. However, the available numbers leave considerable room for interpretation when estimating real-world performance. The RAM shortage is also making pricing increasingly difficult to predict, though Sony's next console could still land well short of a widely feared quadruple-digit price tag.
YouTube channel Moore's Law Is Dead recently made new claims about the performance of upcoming next-generation consoles based on supposedly leaked internal documents from AMD. Although most analysts expect the PlayStation 6 to improve ray tracing performance over the PlayStation 5 significantly, its overall impact on game performance remains a subject of debate.
Traditional rasterized performance might triple – a modest upgrade compared to leaps between previous console generations. The declining gap reflects assertions from Sony and other manufacturers that rasterization gains are approaching a plateau.
Meanwhile, the PS6 might handle ray tracing operations six to 12 times faster than its predecessor, prompting comparisons with Nvidia's RTX 5090. However, another prominent leaker, KeplerL2, disagrees, noting that ray tracing performance does not tell the whole story.
Although the PS6 might complete ray tracing-related tasks for each frame in approximately one-fifth the time it takes the PS5, other operations – including rasterization – still often play a more significant role. As a result, overall performance gains for the next-generation console might be just over 300%, depending on the game.
Titles that rely more heavily on ray tracing might see larger improvements, but probably not by an order of magnitude. While consoles never provide an apples-to-apples comparison with PC graphics cards, the latest information places the RTX 4080 as the PS6's closest PC counterpart.
Pricing is another area of intense debate. The RAM crisis has pushed the standard PS5's price upward to $650, while the PlayStation 5 Pro now costs an astounding $900. While the situation has sparked fears of a $1,000 PS6, Kepler estimates that $700 remains on the table.
The console's current bill of materials might be around $760, and Sony could subsidize it, with game purchases making up the difference. Storage and the disc drive would be the easiest things to cut, so the company might need to offer the PS6 without physical media support and with as little as 1TB to remain under $800.
However, 1TB on a PS6 might feel less constrained than on a PS5, as speculation leans toward Sony, AMD, and Nvidia introducing neural texture compression to reduce how much storage space and video memory next-generation games consume.
Current expectations place the console's launch in late 2027 or early 2028.
Leakers claim PlayStation 6 could offer at least 3x the performance of the PS5
