PlayStation 5 Pro to Introduce New First-Party Super Resolution Tech, 4x Ray Tracing Performance Uplift Over PS5

Sony is giving final touches to a first-party super-resolution technology called PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), according to a sensational new leak by Moore’s Law is Dead. The company plans to debut the tech with the new PlayStation 5 Pro console, this November. The tech is unlikely to make it to the current PlayStation 5 console due to the underlying graphics architecture. PSSR, from the looks of it, is closer in function to NVIDIA DLSS than it is to AMD FSR. The tech leverages the over 300 TOPS of AI inferencing power of the RDNA 3 GPU powering the PS5 Pro, to drive an AI-based reconstruction algorithm. The RDNA 2-based GPU of the current PS5 lacks AI accelerators. The biggest driving force behind the PSSR development isn’t just this AI-based upscaling tech, but the impact of upscaling tech on frame-times and whole-system latencies. PSSR apparently makes the PS5 Pro capable of being not just a 4K-class game console, but also one that’s ready to take on 8K. Sony is, after all, a television company, and would want to create use-cases for its latest 8K televisions.

A lot is also being speculated about the GPU driving the PlayStation 5 Pro. We’ve known from several older leaks that it is based on AMD’s latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture, but we’re now learning that the GPU will be a mix-match of several current and future graphics architectures from AMD’s IP bouquet. It could have more advanced media and display engines than the current Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, but even the shader engines could incorporate certain elements from a future architecture, such as RDNA 4. The report speaks of a total AI inferencing performance of 300 TOPS, an FP16 throughput 67 TFLOPs, and an FP32 throughput of 33.5 TFLOPs. To put these into perspective, the GPU driving the Xbox Series X is rated for 12 TFLOPs FP32.