This new dive into the bowels of the PS5 Pro, a machine that its manufacturer has never mentioned yet but which would be released before the end of the year, confirms the bases of the previous report, namely that the console mid-generation features 60 calculation units and 30 WGP (Work Group Processors) offering performance of 33.5 teraflops. When we compare this figure with the 10.23 teraflops of the PS5, the power gain may seem strangely enormous (+ 227%!) but it is distorted by a change in architecture. Basically, the RDNA 3 architecture uses the FP32 format which doubles the quantity of instructions processed without this being felt proportionally in games. Vulgarly, Sony always talks about a 45% power gain between the PS5 and the PS5 Pro.
Curiously, the clock speed of the PS5 was announced at 2.18 Ghz compared to 2.23 Ghz for the base PS5. The new information reveals that the PS5 Pro can actually booster this frequency up to 2.35 GHz (for a theoretical maximum of 36.1 teraflops). “ We can assume that the slight reduction in overall clock speed (just under three percent) probably makes no difference, while the “ultra boost” mode should instead provide much higher graphics performance for titles existing “, we can read. As reported in an article from The Vergethe “ultra-boost” mode is intended for the technical optimization of games that have not been designed specifically for the PS5 Pro.
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The PlayStation 5 Pro's GPU has evolved to include certain DirectX12 Ultimate features absent from the 2020 console. Here's to the joys of variable rate shading, hybrid multisampling and mesh shaders, if these barbaric terms mean anything to you. The structure of the GPU cache has also evolved. The 4 MB of L2 cache per WGP remains unchanged, while the L1 cache has increased from 128 KB to 256 KB to accommodate the greater number of computing units. The L0 cache has also been increased from 16 KB to 32 KB in an effort to improve ray tracing performance.
“ It still seems surprising to me that a 67% increase in compute units only translates to 45% more performance, but as with the PS4 Pro compared to the PS4, the increase in compute units is not linear in relation to the increase in game performance. Memory bandwidth only increases by around 29% between the PS5 and Pro, for example. I think we'll have to judge the Pro more holistically, based on its real-world results, and PSSR upscaling could be just as transformative for Sony as it was for Nvidia DLSS », suggests Richard Leadbetter.
Speaking of this famous PSSR technology, for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, the article notes that it can be applied without great difficulty to games already released without having to migrate to the latest Sony development kit. Thus, a higher resolution and a more powerful reconstruction technique could change the situation, in particular for performance modes at 60 frames per second which do not always give satisfaction on current PS5s.
Richard Leadbetter also believes that the PS5 Pro's architecture has learned from the PS4 Pro's shortcomings. According to developers interviewed at the time, having to manage 4x higher resolution with just 512 MB of additional memory was an unlikely mission, and professionals weren't convinced by the checkerboard rendering technology either (checkerboard rendering) presented at the time by Sony to improve the resolution of PS4 Pro games. “ The PS5 Pro appears to be a much stronger proposition: enough computing power to increase the resolution if necessary, but superior reconstruction technology that should enable convincing 4K results from 1080p inputs », concludes the specialist.
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