The PS5 Pro will see important improvements compared to the PS5. These improvements will be targeted on GPU and on new hardware a dedicated artificial intelligence specialist, which will be the component that will be responsible for carrying out the entire workload that PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution technology will entail, intelligent scaling promises significant performance improvements.

Sony will also improve the CPU and unified memory, but in this case the improvements will be quite modest, as they will be limited to increase in work frequency get a bit more performance in general. There will be no increase in the total number of CPU cores, no change in architecture, and no increase in the amount of unified memory.

During an interview with Moore’s Law is Dead, Alderon Game co-founder Matthew Cassells spoke in depth about all of these changes and what will they mean for PS5 Pro, both in terms of performance and improved graphics quality in games, as well as the implementation of ray tracing in more titles.

The PS5 Pro will appear to be twice as powerful as the PS5, even though it really isn’t

And this will be possible in large part thanks to the magic that PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution technology, also known as PSSR, can do. This intelligent scaling will have very low resource consumptionbecause in theory it will allow scaling from 1080p to 2160p with a cost of only 2ms in render time and a memory consumption of about 250MB.

However, its impact on performance will be very large if it could increase overall performance by up to 50%. This would be enough to move a game that runs at 30 FPS with a certain configuration to 60 FPS, but we would still have improvements derived from a much more powerful GPU compatible with new technologies and a faster CPU and memory, which could add another 50%.

Combining all of this would make the PS5 Pro seem twice as powerful as the PS5. This would be a huge improvement for intergenerational renovation and will have a significant impact both in the fluidity of the games and in the overall graphic quality of them, although we will have to see how it behaves with very demanding graphics engines such as Unreal Engine 5.

Smoother games with higher graphics quality and ray tracing

According to Matthew Cassells, these would be the three most important keys to the PS5 Pro PSSR technology would make this possible use ray tracing to games that run at 60 FPS and maintain that level of smoothness. It will also enable improvements at the GPU level increase the level of graphic quality in games without affecting performance.

Matthew said that most of the games coming to PS5 are powered medium graphic qualityand that the greater power of the PS5 Pro GPU will allow the same games to be played in very high or even ultra quality without having to give up 60 FPS. It will also be possible to adjust the graphics quality level to offer a higher FPS rate for you to enjoy 120Hz mode.

Ray tracing is very demanding, and with the support of advanced rescaling technology, the PS5 Pro will need new specialized hardware that will allow it to accelerate the full load that such technology entails. In theory, your GPU will have important advances derived from the RDNA 4 architecture, which could double intersection calculation capacity and introduce further optimizations.

All the information I’ve seen so far is promising and makes predictions that said the PS5 Pro will dual ray tracing performance They make sense, but I recommend that you don’t get carried away and keep your expectations reasonable, because until we see actual performance figures, nothing is certain.

CPU and memory problem, bottleneck on PS5 Pro?

This is a topic I’ve mentioned to you on more than one occasion, that the PS5 Pro will have the same Zen 2 octa-core CPU as the PS5, but will run on 3.85 GHz (385 MHz plus). This small difference in speed will translate into a slight improvement in performance and has raised doubts about the potential bottleneck of the more powerful GPU this console will have.

To this question, Matthew Cassells said that he does not believe it will be a massive problem because most consoles don’t suffer from CPU bottlenecks. Developer kits make it possible to optimize games more deeply and make better use of available resources at the hardware level, and the use of ray tracing or very high graphic qualities also triggers the use of the GPU, that’s right.

However, in this case I have some doubts, especially since when using PSSR resolution up to 1080pand at this level, with a GPU as powerful as the PS5 Pro’s, there could be a bottleneck depending on each game’s requirements, its graphics quality configuration, and whether it uses ray tracing. With everything, It wouldn’t even be a serious bottleneck.

Another issue that has raised questions is the unified memory configuration. The PS5 Pro will have 16GB of GDDR6, the same amount as the PS5, but it will run on 20 Gbps, which will increase the bandwidth. Sony may include slower system and application memory free up some GDDR6 that would be used by PSSRbut it is not confirmed.

Matthew noted that keeping the same amount of unified memory is important because ultimately developers optimize their games based on this component, the amount of available memory. That’s why I’ve always talked to you about the minimum development basics in cross-platform games, because every game that’s being developed always starts with minimal hardwareand that’s the one that will eventually limit it.

The PS5 has 16 GB of unified memory, so This will be the basis from which future game development will depend.. Increasing the amount of memory on the PS5 Pro would increase production costs and add a level of complexity to game development that not all developers would take advantage of.

We’ve already seen this with the Xbox One at the time It was not used as we expected and strangely it was limited by a bottleneck at the CPU level, which makes me doubt Matthew’s comment on the subject even more.

All in all, despite the limitations of repeating the Zen 2 CPU and keeping the 16GB memory configuration, I believe the PS5 Pro will represent an important leap compared to the PS5 in every sense, and that it will be the first console that can truly move ray traced games without drowning in the attempt.