Can *Assassin’s Creed: Shadows* Go from 30 FPS to 300 FPS? The PS6 Ray Tracing Myth Has Cooled Down

Regarding the PS6 rumors, the one driving the most hype over the past two days is “ray tracing performance reaches 10 times that of the PS5.” The number looks like a cheat code, and many players immediately translated it into “game frame rates will also skyrocket by 10x,” with some even imagining that the PS6 will be powerful enough to outperform the RTX 5090. But based on the latest leaks, that chain of reasoning doesn’t hold up. The hype is real, but the actual outcome is nowhere near that dramatic.

Well-known leaker KeplerL2 directly poured cold water on this discussion on NeoGAF, and the core point was very clear: the outside world, especially some content creators, has shown obvious misunderstanding of AMD-related documentation. The so-called “10x ray tracing performance improvement” is closer to a theoretical peak, not something that means your in-game frame rate will instantly multiply by 10. The original wording was already quite straightforward: "The so-called '10x ray tracing performance improvement' is a theoretical peak and does not mean game frame rates can directly increase by 10 times."

If we use Assassin’s Creed: Shadows as a sandbox example, this becomes even easier to understand. According to Ubisoft’s data, the PS5 can maintain a stable 30FPS with ray tracing mode enabled; if we temporarily ignore the frame rate cap and assume the PS6 really does have 10 times the ray tracing processing power, the final combined rendering result would still only be about 103.3FPS. In other words, ray tracing alone is not the only factor determining how long it takes to finish a frame—rasterization, compute, and baseline rendering all consume time as well.

This is exactly the trap that many spec-focused enthusiasts are most likely to fall into: treating a single metric as the whole-machine experience, and treating laboratory peak numbers as actual living-room performance. The conclusion given in the article is that, in games that do not rely heavily on ray tracing, the PS6’s real-world frame rate improvement is more likely to be closer to 3.1 times that of the base PS5, not 10 times. Even in titles with heavy ray tracing and path tracing workloads, rasterization and compute usually still account for more than half of the frame time. If underlying performance does not make the leap together, the overall improvement will inevitably be bottlenecked.

From the perspective of players making purchasing decisions, this news is actually quite valuable as a reference. If the PS6 really does end up pushing its price into the 1000-dollar range mentioned in the article because of heavy investment in ray tracing hardware, then players who already own a PS5 will most likely shift from “Should I buy it at launch?” to “Let’s wait and see how it performs in real-world testing first.” Because a console upgrade is not about how impressive a single specification looks, but whether the launch lineup, baseline performance, graphics modes, and price can form a complete and convincing package.

My view is that what the PS6 really needs to prove is not whether it can deliver “10x ray tracing” on paper, but whether it can make 4K, high image quality, and stable high frame rates happen at the same time in more games. If in the end it only puts its marketing focus on the single most eye-catching metric, then it will be more like a new machine with attractive specs than a truly new-generation console that can clearly change the experience. For ordinary players, there’s no need to rush into being swept along by “10x” right now. Waiting until more real game samples appear before deciding where to put your money will be the safer move.