The PlayStation 5 Pro introduces targeted hardware upgrades to enhance graphical fidelity, improve performance, and address specific challenges developers face when creating games for new visions for gaming experiences that test the boundaries of the current hardware. Mark Cerny detailed these improvements in a technical seminar at the SIE HQ, focusing on the rationale behind each feature and its impact on development workflows and gameplay experiences.
The PS5 Pro is this generation’s mid-life console upgrade, designed to enhance current capabilities while maintaining compatibility with existing tools and pipelines and also introduce new technologies that rely on these new improvement whilst maintaining maximum compatibility with currently available developer tools while expanding on them, at the same time.
Balancing Compatibility and Performance
The PS5 Pro’s design was guided by a dual focus: minimizing disruption for developers and delivering measurable performance improvements. Unlike new console generations that demand substantial changes in development pipelines, the PS5 Pro required upgrades to work seamlessly with existing PS5 games while offering developers tools to improve frame rates, rendering quality, and overall performance with minimal effort.
This balancing act shaped the PS5 Pro’s technical strategy, prioritizing compatibility while integrating advanced features in areas where enhancements could provide the most significant benefits, including GPU performance, ray tracing, and AI-driven upscaling.
GPU Enhancements: Expanding Rendering Capabilities
The PS5 Pro’s GPU leverages a hybrid RDNA 2.x architecture, combining features from RDNA 2 and RDNA 3. This approach increases the GPU’s workgroup processors (WGPs) from 18 to 30, representing a 67% increase in raw rendering power.
The decision to expand the GPU’s capacity addressed limitations developers encountered when rendering complex scenes or maintaining high frame rates in graphically demanding games. The hybrid architecture ensures that existing shader programs written for the PS5 remain compatible, avoiding the need for developers to maintain separate codebases for the two consoles. By optimizing the GPU to render frames faster—reducing frame times from 16 milliseconds to 11 milliseconds in certain cases—developers gain the headroom needed to add advanced graphical features like ray tracing or improved lighting without compromising performance.
This expanded GPU capacity also allows for more complex visuals, higher resolutions, and smoother gameplay across a wider range of game scenarios.
Enhanced Ray Tracing: Improving Efficiency and Consistency
Ray tracing on the PS5 Pro has been significantly enhanced through the introduction of BVH8 (Bounding Volume Hierarchy 8) acceleration structures and hardware-based stack management. These advancements address the limitations of the PS5’s BVH4 structures, which struggled with computational inefficiencies in scenes featuring high divergence, where rays scatter in multiple directions.
The BVH8 acceleration structures enable the PS5 Pro to process ray intersections at double the speed of the PS5. By encoding geometry more efficiently, the BVH8 structure reduces the computational overhead required to determine how rays interact with objects in a scene. This improvement allows for more realistic reflections, shadows, and lighting effects without significantly increasing processing time.
Additionally, hardware-based stack management simplifies how divergent rays are handled, reducing the complexity of shader programs. This results in faster and more consistent performance, particularly in scenes with intricate geometry or curved surfaces. For developers, these upgrades enable the use of ray tracing in scenarios that were previously impractical, broadening the range of graphical effects they can implement.
AI-Driven Upscaling: Introducing PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution
To further enhance performance, the PS5 Pro incorporates PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a machine-learning-based upscaling solution. PSSR addresses the computational challenges of rendering every frame at native resolution, which can be resource-intensive in graphically complex scenes.
PSSR allows games to render at lower internal resolutions while upscaling the output to 4K or higher. This is achieved using lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) optimized for real-time gaming. The PS5 Pro’s custom GPU hardware supports 300 trillion operations per second (TOPS), enabling PSSR to process frames efficiently while maintaining high image quality.
The design of PSSR focuses on dynamic adaptation, making it particularly suited to console gaming. Unlike fixed upscaling solutions, PSSR can handle variable upscaling ratios, allowing the system to dynamically adjust the rendering resolution based on scene complexity. This ensures consistent performance across a wide range of visual scenarios, giving developers the flexibility to prioritize other aspects of game design, such as lighting or material detail.
Memory and Bandwidth: Supporting Advanced Features
The PS5 Pro introduces enhancements to its memory architecture to support the additional computational demands of its new features. System memory bandwidth has been increased by 28%, reaching 576 GB/s, while additional DDR5 memory has been allocated to offload operating system tasks and free up high-bandwidth memory for games.
These adjustments address the additional memory requirements of ray tracing and AI upscaling, such as acceleration structures and neural network buffers. By providing sufficient memory resources, the PS5 Pro ensures that developers can implement advanced graphical effects and higher rendering resolutions without encountering bottlenecks.
Project Amethyst: Advancing Machine Learning in Gaming
The PS5 Pro also serves as a foundation for Project Amethyst, a collaborative effort between Sony and AMD to further integrate machine learning into gaming hardware and software. This project builds on the lessons learned during the development of the PS5 Pro’s custom AI hardware and PSSR.
The collaboration scope of this project integrates lessons from AMD’s RDNA roadmap and Sony’s custom design work on the PS5 Pro. It focuses on creating a more efficient architecture for running lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are central to AI-driven graphics features such as upscaling and denoising.
One of the primary goals of Project Amethyst is to achieve fully fused neural networks, where all processing occurs on-chip, eliminating the need for repeated memory transfers. This would address the bandwidth limitations encountered in the PS5 Pro and enable higher computational efficiency for AI tasks. Additionally, Project Amethyst aims to develop a shared library of high-quality neural network architectures for game developers, supporting applications beyond graphics, including AI-driven gameplay features.
The collaborative nature of Project Amethyst ensures that these advancements will not remain proprietary to Sony but will contribute to the broader adoption of machine learning in gaming across multiple platforms.
Closing Thoughts
This seminar follows weeks after the PS5 Pro’s launch and does give details into how the hardware handles the new additions like PSSR and the overall improved performance that the PS5 Pro. One my own personal criticism is that PSSR may be able to run on older hardware as they both use the exact same chip but the process stack does explain the requirements of PSSR and it does make sense although it will most likely be the same as how modders have modded RTX features to run on GTX cards back when it was new.
No new gameplay or any specific game title was announced and the seminar was purely hardware focused to divulge information on how the PS5 Pro works, possibly in a move to court developers to make games for the PlayStation platform as they have these tools.
Other than that, the collaboration with AMD should open up some unique discoveries in utilizing unified on-chip for AI and ML and possibly more but other than, this is just a purely PS5 Pro hardware discussion focusing mostly on the reasons why Sony chose the specific hardware capabilities instead of another.
