Not necessarily. I think the contract could mean HW RT will only be available to PS5 and any AMD gpus that's able to support the feature except, MS Scarlett family. So in the end it's a win win for AMD and Sony, it would be a dumb deal if it's only Sony alone.
Or, MS didn't want it in the first place. Rather they preferred their own versatile DXR API for the job and saving the die space for more CUs. Would be interesting to see the end results tho, and I'm not expecting 1080ti vs 2060 raytracing difference lol.
The litmus test comes down to understanding how business operates. There are 3 bodies in these types of setups, the semi-custom organization is separate from RTG. So there is AMD-RTG, AMD-Sony, AMD-MS, and any other group that works with AMD would have their own partner team.
The three bodies are isolated to ensure that there is no theft of IP or leaks of information.
What can happen is they what RTG is working on both Sony and MS have access to. What Sony does with AMD-Sony is not known to the other two and vice versa.
The bridge point is AMD-RTG however. And I can safely confirm that AMD is working on their own RT solution. Sony I suspect at the least it’s what RTG is working on, it’s a custom variant of it.
If Sony makes its own RT solution, it’s on them but that won’t stop RTG or MS from collaborating on their own solutions which can back port to RTG. It’s not ideal to be an exotic method of doing RT. As we see with the move from PS3 to PS4, the uphill battle is making graphics better while decreasing cost to develop for the studios. Exotic hardware could enable better graphics but the cost for development will also increase.
This is why we haven’t seen any real crazy customizations from the mid-gen refreshes. Games get better looking with either more time or more money. Evolution in graphics are probably more directly related into how we build games today than just flat out having more power. The tools are better, our technology is better, we have new methods of tackling problems.
You can apply the RT concept to the architectures etc. The initial rumour was this co-op with Sony and RTG, but if it were true and you heard about it, that doesn’t make a lot of sense
, because sony wouldn’t back port to MS. And AMD wouldn't announce things on behalf of Sony. These are sealed off teams.
We’re going to see very similar performance points at the same price point. So if you want to know which console is stronger look at the price. If the price the same then you can more or less expect performance to be the same.