The PS5 Pro Is Selling Well, Sony Finally Explains How It Works

Sony can finally stick a feather in its cap over its PlayStation brand. The $700 PlayStation 5 Pro is selling relatively well, according to oft-cited Circana video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella. To mark the occasion, Sony pulled back the curtain on mid-cycle console refresh’s GPU architecture and some of its idiosyncrasies, all while coining a new word to explain it all.

In a video posted Wednesday, Sony’s lead systems architect on both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Mark Cerny, lectured listeners about the PS5 Pro in his usual ASMR-style drawl. He specifically targeted the “erroneous” hints of the latest PlayStation’s GPU performance. Multiple leaks have hinted the Pro’s GPU sits at 33.5 teraflops of GPU capability. To explain, teraflops, or TFLOPS, is the mathematical rating of how well a graphics processor can perform. Specifically, it measures how fast it can perform one trillion floating point operations per second.

That “33.5” number is all wrong, he said. The correct number of workgroup processors (WGPs) on PS5 was 18, which has increased to 30 WGPs on PlayStation 5 Pro. The teraflops should be 67% more than the last gen. Further, he quoted the wizards at Digital Foundry, saying doubling the teraflops of a GPU does not necessarily result in double the performance. He said this is “flopflation,” a term we hope becomes more common parlance in graphics circles partly because it’s well-documented and partially because it’s fun to say.

So if the PS5 performs at 10 TFLOPS, the PS5 Pro should go up to around 16.7. But, according to Cerny, “teraflop numbers are pretty meaningless.” What’s more important is how each individual game performs with the new architecture. Each of the WGPs are more powerful than before, which means faster ray tracing capabilities for games that support those pretty in-game lighting technologies.

Fair enough, Mr. Cerny. In our experience, the PlayStation 5 Pro is a more capable console than the regular, old PlayStation 5. It’s also a very, very similar experience to your regular PS5, just with potentially better visuals and framerates. How much of a better experience it is depends on the game. Titles that rely on the GPU more than the PS5’s CPU can get more out of the Pro, as evidenced by Digital Foundry’s tests.

The video is 37 minutes long, so it probably won’t hold the layperson’s attention for too long. Still, it’s also the most detailed Sony has been about its own PS5 Pro architecture yet. The PS5 Pro still uses the same AMD RDNA 2 architecture as the original PS5. RDNA 3 exists, but Cerny said the Pro’s GPU is a “hybrid… RDNA 2.x” that combines several generations of AMD’s tech. In a Q&A with IGN, the PS5’s lead architect explained they built the new GPU so developers didn’t have to do any extra work with drivers to get it to work.

“If we’re making a new generation of console, of course, we want the latest and greatest,” Cern said. “We also have to consider a single game package needs to support PS5 and PS5 Pro. That limited the degree we could adopt RDNA 3 technologies.”

We already knew the PS5 Pro had faster internal memory. Cerny explained that the GDDR6 RAM on the Pro’s GPU went from 448 GB/s to 576 GB/s and claimed it provides 1 GB more game memory. More chunks of the new memory are dedicated to integrating its AI upscaling, PSSR, alongside extra ray tracing capabilities. He even cited the PS5’s ability to target 8K resolution despite Sony no longer advertising the PS5’s 8K capabilities.

He also explained how the upscaling of the Pro’s GPU is very new, or at least for consoles. PlayStation spectral super-resolution, otherwise shortened to PSSR, is built into the “Enhanced GPU” itself through a modified shader core. That’s unlike a modern Nvidia RTX discrete GPU, which has a dedicated tensor unit for its own upscaling tech, DLSS. It also means PSSR may not be as powerful as other blends of upscaling tech from Nvidia. It’s also more recent than AMD’s FSR or Intel’s XeSS, so it lacks some of those upscalers’ capabilities.

The upscaling tech includes 44 machine learning algorithms that take a frame at a lower resolution and upscale it to a higher resolution, increasing performance without detracting from visual quality. Cerny told IGN that Sony is “fantastically interested” in frame generation, which inserts artificial frames in-game to better increase those framerates.

The video is interesting to watch, especially if you bought the PS5 Pro based solely on the thought of playing your games with the best graphics possible. According to Piscatella, there are plenty of those out there. The regular PS5 was the most-sold console of November, he said, but the Pro model accounted for 19% of those sold, beating the percentage of PlayStation 4 Pro consoles sold in the same month back in 2016. For $700, you’re not matching the absolute performance of the latest gaming PC GPUs, but then again, you don’t really need it to.