When Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro, it did so in a very different manner to the reveal of PlayStation 4 Pro and PlayStation 5. While lead system architect Mark Cerny was ‘master of ceremonies’ for the Pro reveal, the debut has a shortlived nine-minute affair – and a good proportion of that run-time celebrated the achievements of the standard PlayStation 5 console. It was a far cry from the detailed presentation given for the reveal of Sony’s first ‘Pro’ console and somewhat bereft of detail compared to the now legendary ‘Road to PS5’ presentation given by Cerny in March 2020. We were left hungry for more details – and now, they have finally arrived.
A good three months after the reveal, Sony has delivered a brand new deep-dive presentation into the hardware design and indeed the behind PlayStation 5 Pro – and it’s important stuff. The philosophy behind the console marks a sea-change in the way that consoles will be made. While the core graphics rendering tech of the PlayStation 5 Pro has been enhanced over the standard machine, Cerny sees a future where machine learning plays a key role in console design, and while rasterisation is nearing its limits, he sees vast scaling in ray tracing capabilities going forward.
It’s a vision that shares commonalities with Nvidia’s strategy over the last six years, except the impression we get is that AMD will continue to be Sony’s partner of choice in delivering this new vision. To that end, a new ‘Amethyst’ collaboration between Sony and AMD has been announced.
Digital Foundry’s Oliver Mackenzie had the chance to see the new Cerny presentation several weeks ago and to interview Mark Cerny himself, alongside Mike Fitzgerald – Insomniac’s director of core technology. However, the presentation itself is something that all Digital Foundry team members were eager to discuss, so here’s our reaction to the talk – and, of course, an overview of everything we’ve learned.
GPU overview: RDNA 2.x, 16.7TF
The most obvious evolution from the base PS5 to the PS5 Pro comes in terms of its graphics processing horsepower. Rather than increasing CPU performance, improving storage speeds or targeting higher resolution displays, as you might expect from a brand new console, the main focus with PS5 Pro is shoring up performance and image quality with a more capable GPU. Interestingly, the PS5 Pro GPU is still based on AMD’s RDNA 2 (RX 6000-series) architecture, but with some features backported from RDNA 3 (RX 7000-series) – and from RDNA 4 (RX 8000-series, expected 2025) as well.