For months, rumors surrounding the future PS6 ignite the gaming sphere. Articles and videos promise a console “up to eight or ten times more powerful than the PS5“, with ray tracing everywhere and 4K 120 frames per second presented as the new standard. Enough to create enormous expectations among gamers.
But new lighting cools the atmosphere. The specialized site Notebookcheck already headlines “PS6 performance gains may have been overhyped”, based on the technical analyst KeplerL2 who proofreads the documents AMD APU related Orion. According to him, the famous x10 in ray tracing would rather translate into a gain of around x3 in real number of images per second.
PS6: how did we go from x10 promises to a much more modest reality?
On the technical sheet side, the leaks remain impressive. There PS6 would carry an APU AMD Orion engraved in 3 nm, with a CPU Zen 6 7 to 10 cores and a GPU RDNA 5 from 50 to 54 computing units, for around 34 to 40 TFLOPs, supported by 30 to 40 GB of very fast GDDR7.
On this basis, the leaker MLID talked about x2.5 to x3 in rasterization, x5 to x10 in ray tracing and up to x8 overall with the FSR4which many media relayed. KeplerL2 however, strongly qualifies these figures by recalling that x10 on dedicated calculation units does not mean x10 on the final framerate.
PS6: what will this performance really change for your games?
For a player, what does this mean in concrete terms? If a title runs today at 30 frames per second with ray tracing on PS5there PS6 can aim for a very solid 60 frames per second with more effects, or even go higher in less busy scenes, but not multiply the framerate by ten.
The famous 4K 120 frames per second modes will remain reserved for lighter games or modes without advanced ray tracing. The majority of AAAs should instead offer a dynamic or upscaled 4K performance mode via FSR4blocked at 60 frames per second, with more generous ray tracing than today.
Another element to keep in mind is the PS5 Pro. It is already presented as offering a gain of approximately x2 to x3 in ray tracing compared to PS5. If the PS6 only offers in practice an overall x3 compared to the base machine, the gap felt between a PS5 Pro and the new console might seem limited.
PS6: released in 2027, what’s the point if the power already disappoints?
The various leaks always suggest a launch window around the end of 2027 for the PS6, with production which would begin a few months earlier. This leaves Sony time to adjust their choices, but also for players to digest the gap between marketing and credible performance.
As regularly reminded Shuhei Yoshidathe race for teraflops appeals especially to the most advanced enthusiasts. To convince beyond this audience, the PS6 will have to focus on smoother experiences, denser worlds and new features, rather than on a simple x10 figure which already only exists on paper.