AI has become one of the biggest engines in gaming. NVIDIA demonstrated the potential of this technology applied to games with DLSS, and Sony was done fully engulf it with PSSR on PS5 Prointelligent scaling technology that uses hardware-accelerated artificial intelligence algorithms.

I already explained what PSSR is and how it works, so if you have any questions about it, I invite you to check out the link I left a little further down. This technology works in a way similar to NVIDIA Super Resolutionand is only viable if supported by specific hardware because it represents a specific workload that must be vented through said hardware.

In the case of NVIDIA Super Resolution, the acceleration occurs in the tensor cores found in GeForce RTX 20 and higher. The PS5 Pro has a hardware solution that has not yet been specified, but according to leaked PSSR rumors could reach the strength of 300 TOPs. This is equivalent to three times the performance that the current NPU can offer.

What we need to generate AI frameworks

Tensor kernels are also used to speed up DLSS beam reconstruction, but AI frame generation requires another critical component, optical flow accelerator. This component is designed to calculate optical flow and also allows the calculation of stereo disparity between images.

Its role is very important because it enables advanced object detection and tracking process, and also estimate the depth. For example, it can analyze the optical flow between two frames and return values ​​of / 4 x 4 / 2 x 2 / 1 x 1 pixels (output grid size).

No optical flow accelerator, AI frame generation it’s not possible because it allows to obtain very valuable information about the movement and direction of the pixels in each frame. Without it, we don’t have the same information to generate pixels in the correct position in the new image, which will have a negative impact on image quality.

This must also be clear Any optical flow accelerator will not do.it must be one that can operate with the appropriate speed and level of accuracy, otherwise the quality of generating that frame will not be acceptable.

For this reason, NVIDIA limited the generation of DLSS 3 frames to the GeForce RTX 40, because the optical flow accelerator of this generation It was much faster and more accurate. than previous generations. Image generation could be implemented in previous generations, but the quality of the image generation would be lower and could even negatively affect performance.

Why PS5 Pro doesn’t have AI frame generation

It is very simple because does not include the necessary hardware work with this technology. The Sony console comes with an AI acceleration engine that is designed to work with PSSR, which as I said earlier is a clever scaling method, but generating AI-accelerated images requires other specific components such as an optical accelerator.

Sony could bring frame lifting to the PS5 Pro, but it would have to use a basic non-AI implementation like the one in AMD FSR 3. The implementation of this type has significant shortcomings in terms of image quality and stability, which I could clearly verify when comparing the results obtained with the AMD solution and the generation of NVIDIA frames.

And why didn’t Sony include the necessary hardware in the PS5 Pro? The explanation is very simple, although to understand it we must distinguish two main reasons. The first reason was a simple question of time and development deadlines. Sony started working on this console before hardware-accelerated frame rate generation came to the PC world, so the PS5 Pro wasn’t designed with this technology in mind from the start.

When the frame generation started to appear, Sony had already chosen the features of their new console, and if they wanted to introduce an AI-accelerated frame generation, they would have to make important changes that would end. delays the release date. They could also affect the production costs of the console, and therefore its selling price.

Keep in mind that the next generation of AI-accelerated graphics came to PC in late 2022 with the launch of GeForce RTX, and that PS5 Pro will launch on November 7, 2024. They are only two years apartand to develop the equivalent of an optical flow accelerator that would allow the technology to be implemented on its Sony console would require a significant period of time, which would then have to be added to the manufacturing time.

The second reason is that incorporating technology of this type together with PSSR would represent a technical advance and such a large improvement that it would not make sense in an intergenerational renovation. By this I mean that it is very likely that Sony reserved a generation of AI frameworks for its next console, the PS6.

Artificial intelligence applied to games will be key to next-generation consoles

Sony was the first to bet on it with the PS5 Pro and PSSR technology, but this is just the first step towards the growing implementation of artificial intelligence on consoles. We’ve already seen the development of AI applied to gaming in the PC world, and I’m confident that consoles will follow a similar path, albeit at their own pace.

As I said before, AI image generation could come with the next generation of consolesthis technology would enable an important generational leap, and the new generation may also have intelligent upscaling of higher quality and better performance scaling.

Perhaps later the big players in this sector, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, will incorporate other relevant applications such as noise reduction and texture compression, both powered by AI. The first would improve the image quality, especially when using ray tracing, and the second would reduce the graphics memory consumption of textures.

The present and future of gaming includes artificial intelligence, both on PC and console, and will allow improvements in performance and image quality beyond the classic increase in brute force. Hardware will still be important, but specialization and AI will have more and more weight, a reality that will be consolidated with PS6 and Xbox Next.