As said in the same thread on B3D: "Its ray tracing against the framebuffers, nothing new, the same idea behind the reflections in DX11 Crysis 2, and the water reflections of Crysis 3 on all platforms. Its a screen-space effect so not nearly as costly as actual full scene ray tracing against full geometry, and consequentlly it´s also much less robust and more artifact prone. Many people had noticed it already since the first gameplay demo. It´s very good to see the dev´s more in-deapth description of it though, but there is no groundbreaking news here. This is going to be very comon this gen, as epic has already confirmed that UE4 is also employing it in the infiltrator demo. "

It is raytracing but it is also a buzzword and things like these get easily simplified to "PS4 can do raytracing" and this could lead to the assumption that the whole game is done by raytracing ;) The PS3-Cell-statement wasn't that false at all - the cell had (has) a lot of computing power and actually super-computers were build with cell. But that didn't make PS3 a supercomputer.

What I said: MArketing with a buzzword.

I totally agree.

The same thing could be said about ARM processors being in Super Computers, lots of simple slow CPU cores = Super Computer, regardless of each chips individual compute performance, it doesn't make the actual individual processor fast.

Hell, SeaMicro used 512 Intel Atom processors and turned that into a Super Computer, that's netbook grade CPU's. Mind you with a thousand cores it's nothing to sneeze at in the grand scheme of things.

tagging for when i have faster internet.

No one is claiming it as a buzzword. Anyone who knows what ray tracing is will know the quality of it, those who don't will just know that it is a light rendering that resembles real lighting reflection, which is what is being utilized now. It's a big advancement from gen to gen. Lighting techniques are important

Looks fantastic, really excited for the new technical possibilities with next gen consoles.

Going to be buying a PS4 at launch if this keeps up. I hope there's at least one or two solid JRPG in the launch lineup. I would love a next-gen Tales game.

I wish Microsoft would start showing off their hardware too. Although I have low hopes in terms of Japanese support...

There are tons of different quality levels at raytracing, and you can do at the entire rendering pipeline or only sub-parts of it. That's what some of us are saying, that this is a low quality, low performance requirements version of raytracing already used on several games. It's like saying that one game that uses a subsurface scattering algorithm is doing raytracing, it's true for the subsurface scattered material, but it's false for everything else. Graphics are always doing the most with the less resources, this is a nice approximation, but it's not raytracing on the entire rendering pipeline.

Some PS fans will use it as a system wars weapon, but it's a half truth (the best way to spread lies is to use half truths) and a PR buzzword.

We already have 8GB GDDR5. Only actual nerds who know what RT is would bother to use it in console wars.