Without a doubt, the PlayStation 5 Pro is the most powerful gaming console we’ve ever seen. It’s expected to launch next week, promising “45% faster rendering” thanks to a beefier graphics card and faster memory. This won’t be enough to outperform a true gaming computer with one of the best graphics cards – not even close. But the PS5 Pro might have an advantage over PCs in one area.

I say “could” because we really don’t know. AMD referred me to Sony, and Sony did not respond to my request for comment on the details under the hood of the PS5 Pro. I do have some clues though, and if you’ll indulge in some speculation, I have some interesting theories about how the PS5 Pro might have an advantage over even powerful gaming PCs.

The secret weapon of the PS5 Pro

Some context is important here. According to Sony, the performance of the PS5 Pro is based on three pillars: a faster GPU, a better ray tracingand AI-assisted scaling via PSSR. We know all about it, but that doesn’t exactly give the PS5 Pro an advantage over PCs.

But Sony’s senior system architect Mark Cerny said there’s another aspect of the PS5 Pro that Sony isn’t highlighting in press releases. The engineer hinted that the PS5 Pro had ray tracing features that “no other AMD GPU” has yet. He has a trick up his sleeve, so to speak.

There’s a lot to unpack in a quote like that. Cerny refers to ray tracing features, and in a way that is not tied to specific games, but to specific graphics cards. He’s not talking about occlusion or ray-traced ambient reflections – modern AMD GPUs can handle those. Rather, it appears that Cerny is referring to rendering features that would otherwise not be available on AMD desktop graphics cards, even those as powerful as the RX 7900.

Now, Sony says the PS5 Pro will be able to improve or stabilize the performance of more than 8,500 games, but just under 90 matches have proper PS5 Pro enhancements, at least at the time of writing. This means that a large number of games will see a performance boost purely from the larger GPU, but developers need to do a certain level of work specifically to “enhance” their games for the PS5 Pro. It appears that these improvements largely focus on better ray tracing and PSSR.

It is important to keep these two facts in mind. The PS5 Pro has ray tracing features that no AMD graphics card currently has, and at least some of these features require specific developer integration for full support. Once these are established, we can move on to the fun stuff: denoising.

The importance of denoising

Don’t expect Sony to talk about denoising with the PS5 Pro. It doesn’t get into the weeds like that. But the PS5 Pro is a console with “advanced ray tracing” and which requires denoising. You can think of denoising as cleaning up a messy ray traced image. In the image above, you can see a noisy image in the upper left corner. The denoising algorithm steps in and cleans up the grainy mess and leads to the image you see on the right.

Ray tracing works by taking samples of light rays for each pixel. These spring into the scene, bouncing and refracting, hopefully terminating towards a light source. But this is not always the case. These failures mean that certain pixels have no information about the lighting. There are ways around this problem.

You can take more samples per pixel, but at a detrimental performance cost (usually in offline rendering). You can also add weights to a scene to increase the likelihood that the ray will end on a light source. No matter what, you will always be left with a certain amount of noise that you will need to clean up.

There are many ways to handle denoising, usually by looking at previous frames or neighboring pixels to determine what the image is missing. However, we have also seen AI applied to the denoising process via Rebuild of Nvidia’s Ray. Similar to scaling, AI is really good to denoising. You can see for yourself in the image above how much of a difference AI-driven denoising makes, and without any performance penalty.

My theory – and it’s just a theory – is that the PS5 Pro uses some sort of AI-driven denoising. This is just speculation, but I have several reasons why this could be true.

The first is the PSSR itself. Sony says the PSSR is “AI-driven,” which likely means there’s an AI model running in real-time on the console, making your games better. This is also a feature exclusive to PS5 Pro Enhanced Games, which suggests it requires specific integration like Nvidia’s DLSS and cannot work universally like AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution.

Second, we know that AMD is working on AI-powered scaling and denoising with a single algorithm. The company announced that its next version of FSR scaling will include an AI base, and its most recent published research indicates that it is capable of both scaling and denoising with a single model. Additionally, just this week, AMD said that it is working hard to deliver the next version of FSR. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, suggesting that the release is just around the corner.

If that’s not the exclusive ray tracing features Cerny was talking about, I’m not sure what is. If correct, it would give the PS5 Pro a leg up on PCs. We have Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, but it’s only available in five games, and only at higher graphics settings than GPUs as powerful as the RTX4060 would have difficulty running. Meanwhile, we already know of 87 PS5 Pro-enhanced games, and that’s before the console is even here.

Always in the air

The PS5 Pro isn’t here yet, and even when it is, Sony probably won’t release extensive technical details on how it handles denoising. Right now we have two things: AMD’s research into AI-based denoising and upscaling, and features we know about on the PS5 Pro – and I’m trying to connect them . This doesn’t mean it’s a straight line.

However, it would be a very interesting application. Unlike a PC, where these tools are often used to achieve triple-digit frame rates, a console aims for either 30 frames per second (fps) or 60 fps. Shortcuts like scaling and denoising appear in a different context, bringing consoles up to par without pure hardware benefit. Even though it’s still far behind something like the RX 7800XTwe know there’s a big GPU in the PS5 Pro.

Hopefully, it won’t be long before we see AMD’s AI-powered denoiser and upscaler on PC. Not only will this open up wider support in games, but it will also give us a chance to compare the quality to the PS5 Pro to see what’s really going on under the hood.