Sony PlayStation 5 Pro

[Globalisateur]

davis.anthony is talking about framerate performance, not rendering 'performance'. Games currently render at sub-native res and upscale not great. ML upscaling will render at sub-native and upscale better. Either form of upscaling is fast and not a limiting factor. For ML upscaling to unlock rendering performance (which doesn't help any with CPU limited scenarios), you'd have to render at an even lower resolution than you were before.

To get more FPS from PSSR, either it'll need to be able to upscale from lower res to the same quality as the alternative method, or inject frames. But as PS5 games are already upscaled with fast techniques, a simple swap of one upscaler for another nets no more FPS.

That said, the flip side here is 'Quality mode' - games rendering higher res, not upscaling much, and only hitting 30 fps. PSSR will (hopefully) be able to render the Quality Mode visuals at a a lower resolution, upscale to the same quality, and so reduce render time by reducing render res and improve framerate.

For Performance Mode games, there's likely no performance to be gained as davis.anthony suggests, but in Quality Mode there is a potential doubling of framerate. Which then leads to the point of Performance and Quality? Will Pro use PS5 Quality for its Performance mode and then be able to up the bells and whistles for a next tier Quality mode at 30fps?

I think PS5 Pro is designed for this. Keep the same 60fps framerate (present in 99% games) and improve fidelity thanks to new RT / AI upscaling.

 

[davis.anthony]

davis.anthony is talking about framerate performance, not rendering 'performance'. Games currently render at sub-native res and upscale not great. ML upscaling will render at sub-native and upscale better. Either form of upscaling is fast and not a limiting factor. For ML upscaling to unlock rendering performance (which doesn't help any with CPU limited scenarios), you'd have to render at an even lower resolution than you were before.

To get more FPS from PSSR, either it'll need to be able to upscale from lower res to the same quality as the alternative method, or inject frames. But as PS5 games are already upscaled with fast techniques, a simple swap of one upscaler for another nets no more FPS.

That said, the flip side here is 'Quality mode' - games rendering higher res, not upscaling much, and only hitting 30 fps. PSSR will (hopefully) be able to render the Quality Mode visuals at a a lower resolution, upscale to the same quality, and so reduce render time by reducing render res and improve framerate.

For Performance Mode games, there's likely no performance to be gained as davis.anthony suggests, but in Quality Mode there is a potential doubling of framerate. Which then leads to the point of Performance and Quality? Will Pro use PS5 Quality for its Performance mode and then be able to up the bells and whistles for a next tier Quality mode at 30fps?

Thanks Shifty.

It is ultimately going to boil down to whatever resolution base PS5 is using.

If it's in the native 1440p range at 30fps, then dropping PS5 Pro down to 1080p and using PSSR should get you to 60fps.

But the issue is PS5 just of late is well below native 1440p.

Alan Wake 2 in quality mode is 1270p internal and then upscaled with FSR2.

On PS5 Pro, you could drop that resolution down to 1080p and then use PSSR to upscale.

That resolution drop will free up some extra performance but won't be enough to get to 60fps.

So for Alan Wake 2 the question becomes, is the 45% extra GPU performance PS5 Pro has plus that small resolution drop enough to make up the difference to get to 60fps.

 

[Karamazov]

higher memory bandwidth can also help to render at higher res.

I hope we get some official annoucemment/info soon.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Mod Ponderings: Can I take a moment to try to get people to reconsider how they think about 'you don't understand'? Quite often a person is seeing things a different way. They do understand, just something different to you.

When writing the above, I went in thinking exactly as davis.anthony, we are 60fps at low resolution and upscaling already and there's no performance to be gained. But in thinking about it, I tried to see where the other argument was coming from. If you assume Globby isn't misunderstanding, but is understanding something different to me...then I realised what he was saying in the point about quality, coupled with the epiphany that there's different rendering modes now and we can't assume people are starting from the assumptions going in.

I really do dislike "you don't understand" comments. I'd rather people share perspectives with enough give and take that consensus can be reached, or we get a handle on their perspective and can at least agree to disagree. The vast majority of posters here aren't daft and I think we should have more faith in each other's opinions.

 

[Nesh]

But as I highlighted in the other thread.

Moving to ML based upscaling does basically nothing in terms of extra performance.

It only improves image quality.

There's the potential to see frame generation based on FSR3's algorithm, but using ML input frames via PSSR, but none of that is confirmed.

But isn't the point of AI image reconstruction the fact that the native resolution can be lower while giving similar results to higher resolutions, thus freeing performance for a given image quality thus achieving, for example stable or higher framerates?

 

[Globalisateur]

davis.anthony is talking about framerate performance, not rendering 'performance'. Games currently render at sub-native res and upscale not great. ML upscaling will render at sub-native and upscale better. Either form of upscaling is fast and not a limiting factor. For ML upscaling to unlock rendering performance (which doesn't help any with CPU limited scenarios), you'd have to render at an even lower resolution than you were before.

To get more FPS from PSSR, either it'll need to be able to upscale from lower res to the same quality as the alternative method, or inject frames. But as PS5 games are already upscaled with fast techniques, a simple swap of one upscaler for another nets no more FPS.

That said, the flip side here is 'Quality mode' - games rendering higher res, not upscaling much, and only hitting 30 fps. PSSR will (hopefully) be able to render the Quality Mode visuals at a a lower resolution, upscale to the same quality, and so reduce render time by reducing render res and improve framerate.

For Performance Mode games, there's likely no performance to be gained as davis.anthony suggests, but in Quality Mode there is a potential doubling of framerate. Which then leads to the point of Performance and Quality? Will Pro use PS5 Quality for its Performance mode and then be able to up the bells and whistles for a next tier Quality mode at 30fps?

Yes so in the end the framerate will get doubled on Pro (as long as the final fps is max 60fps).

In the lastest article they gave us 2 real cases of improvements: from 60fps non-RT mode to 60fps with RT, and from 30fps fidelity to basically 60fps fidelity. In the end it will be a framerate improvement for many games and in both cases, the Pro version mode runs at 60fps (which wasn't the case at all on PS4 Pro, in that area PS5 Pro will be a much better improvement).

Console people do no want 120fps framerate modes. Those players want better fidelity at 60fps. But I fear he does what many will do: "it can't do path tracing at 60fps like a 4090, so it's a failure". Sure we can always postulate unreachable targets for a $500 machine vs a $3000 high end PC. My "You don't (want to) understand" was a polite way to say he was doing a similar thing. He should understand very well, but he wants to create a new unreachable goalpost in order to create a failure scenario.

Some rumors are talking about real world performance similar to a 4070 (including with RT). PS5 Pro, at this price, will be a very successful package if that's true or near true.

 

[davis.anthony]

But isn't the point of AI image reconstruction the fact that the native resolution can be lower while giving similar results to higher resolutions, thus freeing performance for a given image quality thus achieving, for example stable or higher framerates?

It is, but PS5 is and can already be using a very low resolution.

Alan Wake 2 performance mode for example on base PS5 is below 1080p.

So there's no head room to drop the resolution further on PS5 Pro.

 

[davis.anthony]

In the latest article they gave us 2 real cases of improvements: from 60fps non-RT mode to 60fps with RT, and from 30fps fidelity to basically 60fps fidelity.

They didn't really tell us anything.

What were the native resolutions on the base machine?

What frame rate was the base machine running at?

In the first example, the base machine could have been running the RT mode at 45fps.

In the second example the base machine could actually be at 40fps.

So they don't really tell us much.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes so in the end the framerate will get doubled on Pro (as long as the final fps is max 60fps).

In existing 30fps Quality Mode titles. Unless Quality mode on Pro uses higher quality settings, at which point you'll be 30fps again just with more graphics.

There isn't a black&white performance measure here. It depends what developers choose to do with PSSR and PS5Pro's visuals.

 

[Henry swagger]

You don't seem (want?) to understand. We see this with DLSS in some games with 4K DLSS looking as good as native albeit with much less rendering time from the GPU. In the end you get a similar image as native with much less rendering time: You indirectly get extra performance.

FSR is not that at all. You spend 2ms on a frame and you don't get an overall improvement. Players don't say FSR is like "magic". Many see it's sharper when in stills but adds tons of artefacts, ghosting and ugliness (notably in motion) to the final frames.

Years of DLSS (and how Nvidia improved it) showed that AI upscaling is the future and Cerny clearly understood this as they seem to go full in.

Well said

 

[Henry swagger]

No it isn't, it's just upscaling.

PS5 has upscaling.

You mean fsr ? .. fsr is not in the same league as dlss and pssr even sony thru shots at the bad fsr quality in the leaks

 

[yoowul]

It is, but PS5 is and can already be using a very low resolution.

Alan Wake 2 performance mode for example on base PS5 is below 1080p.

So there's no head room to drop the resolution further on PS5 Pro.

Well if PS5 Pro's GPU being 45% faster than PS5's is true then it doesn't need to lower the resolution further in performance mode, maybe it can even up it a bit (maybe, as PS5 code has some framerate drops) plus achieve better image quality through better upscaling.

 

[davis.anthony]

You mean fsr ? .. fsr is not in the same league as dlss and pssr even sony thru shots at the bad fsr quality in the leaks

But we're not talking about the quality, were talking about the performance.

Yes DLSS looks better than FSR2.

But at the same input resolution they perform the same.

 

[Nesh]

It is, but PS5 is and can already be using a very low resolution.

Alan Wake 2 performance mode for example on base PS5 is below 1080p.

So there's no head room to drop the resolution further on PS5 Pro.

Yeah kind of makes me wonder what kind of differences they will be pulling off. The console does has some extra performance though. Not as big as from PS4 to PS4 Pro.

I guess a) better framerates in Quality with better image reconstruction and b) better IQ in Performance. But then again that starts to blur out differences between the two modes. Unless games start pushing more visual detail in Quality that takes it back to 30fps and Pro's Performance becomes PS5's Quality mode at 60fps

 

[rntongo]

GPU can be done with the given resources, depending on how heavy raytracing is. 67% more CU's, 2.7ghz would get it to an easy doubling of compute resources, all ably handled by a 64mb LLC for bandwidth, and RT is faster still. I expect we'll see the 4k modes for GoW Ragnarok and Spiderman 2 upgraded to 60fps, probably Forbidden West too.

We won't see 60fps on Dragon's Dogma 2 or GTA VI, I don't expect them to overcome the image quality issues of upscaling 30 to 60 well enough (though I'd love to be proven wrong). But we could see other stuff. Dragon's Dogma 2 and FFVII Rebirth have raytracing not far out of reach, raytracing upgrades wouldn't be surprising.

Again we need to be patient, I think the initial issue is people didnt realize the base PS5 was a 4K 30 system with a 5700 XT GPU. The target for PSSR is 4K 120 in the future but on the PS5 pro its 4K 60. GTA 6 is going to be designed around 4K 30 fps 100% certain about this but its down to the hw acceleration to take care of the upscaling workload. Sony and MSFT have a lot of empirical data on CPU calls for such workloads. I trust Sony has worked a lot with developers to make it a seamless experience. You could be right but I'm waiting until the specs are finalized and officially released before concluding. The CPU upgrade looks fine to me.

 

[rntongo]

It's not too early and is very easy to make a judgement.

The upgrade in CPU is nothing, and unless Rockstar have designed GTA6 to be a 60fps game from day one (highly doubtful), you're not getting 60fps in GTA6 from a CPU point of view on PS5 Pro. Rockstar have never released a new GTA game that's 60fps, they have all been 30fps and I seriously doubt they will break that tradition with GTA6.

From the GPU side, if base PS5 is 30fps and upscaling from 1080p or lower, you're not getting 60fps in PS5 Pro as the GPU upgrade isn't strong enough. If base PS5 upscaling from 1440p or so at 30fps then PS5 Pro should be able to manage 60fps from the GPU side. But the lower the resolution base PS5 renders at the less and less likely it becomes that PS5 Pro will do 60fps from the GPU. And it still also depends if the CPU is good enough for 60fps.

As an upgrade, PS5 Pro is well below the improvement we got from PS4 Pro, especially on the GPU side.

PS4 Pro vs PS4

CPU = 1.3x faster
GPU = 2.3x faster
Memory Bandwidth = 24% increase

PS5 Pro vs PS5

CPU = 1.1x faster
GPU = 1.45x faster
Memory Bandwidth = 28% increase

PS5 Pro is interesting from an architectural point of view in regard to ray tracing, but other than that the specs are nothing special and well below the upgrade PS4 Pro gave over base PS4.

I have had some great calls this gen, like saying back in 2021 that we were 100% going to get a PS5 pro. For one, I never said GTA 6 would be designed with a 4K 60 target. They have designed the game around 16GB of unified memory for 4K 30 fps target on the base consoles. With the pro, they will use PSSR to target 4K 60 fps(this endeavor is a fact) although its plausible it may not work out, they will put effort in hitting this target on the PS5 pro.

Also there is one thing missing in your arithmetic comparing last gen to this gen. Sony was able to hit the 4K target on the PS4 pro using upscaling algorithms. Consumers couldnt tell between native and upscaled 4K. The same will be true for the PS5 pro. In empirical analysis the pro will be able to deliver 4K games(including GTA 6) at higher frame rates than the base PS5. It will be up to the DFs to find faults here and there but it wont matter empirically. The pro will have higher frame rate gaming at 4K both statistically and empirically, and last I checked the base PS5 isnt running games below 4K 30 and the pro console will be expected to run those base PS5 games at frame rates higher than 30 fps at 4K.

 

[rntongo]

It's not base PS5 at native resolution vs PS5 Pro with PSSR

It's base PS5 with FSR/TSR/CB vs PS5 Pro with PSSR

This point is kind of redundant. Its whether PS5 pro with PSSR can hit 4K 60 that looks as good as native 4K 60. It doesnt matter if the PS5 achieved the same 4K 30 using some basic algorithms without proper hw acceleration. The point is the base PS5 hits 4K 30 upscaled or native and the PS5 pro will be targeting 4K 60 upscaled that looks as good as native 4K 60.

 

[davis.anthony]

This point is kind of redundant. Its whether PS5 pro with PSSR can hit 4K 60 that looks as good as native 4K 60.

The point is, can PS5 Pro hit 60fps with a 4k target using PSSR if base PS5 is 900p at 30fps?

The answer is no.

The point is the base PS5 hits 4K 30 upscaled or native and the PS5 pro will be targeting 4K 60 upscaled that looks as good as native 4K 60.

If base PS5 is upscaled 4k30, you won't get upscaled 40k60 on PS5 Pro.

If base PS5 is native 4k30, then yes you will get upscaled 4k60 on PS5 Pro as there's enough headroom.

The 45% increase in GPU performance is not enough by itself to go from 30fps to 60fps.

Something else has to give to make up the required overhead to get to 60fps.

 

[davis.anthony]

I have had some great calls this gen, like saying back in 2021 that we were 100% going to get a PS5 pro. For one, I never said GTA 6 would be designed with a 4K 60 target. They have designed the game around 16GB of unified memory for 4K 30 fps target on the base consoles. With the pro, they will use PSSR to target 4K 60 fps(this endeavor is a fact) although its plausible it may not work out, they will put effort in hitting this target on the PS5 pro.

If the game is CPU limited to below 60fps on base PS5, then no amount of extra GPU performance will get it to run at 60fps.

They can drop the resolution as much as they want on PS5 Pro, but if the CPU can only manage 40fps, then 40fps is all you'll ever get.

Consumers couldnt tell between native and upscaled 4K.

I'm assuming you have evidence to back up that blanket statement?

In empirical analysis the pro will be able to deliver 4K games(including GTA 6) at higher frame rates than the base PS5.

As long as those games are not CPU limited on base PS5.

The pro will have higher frame rate gaming at 4K both statistically and empirically, and last I checked the base PS5 isnt running games below 4K 30 and the pro console will be expected to run those base PS5 games at frame rates higher than 30 fps at 4K.

When you say 4k? You are aware that very, very few PS5 games are native 4k right?

Nearly all of them are upscaled 4k from lower resolutions.

And the lower the resolution they're upscaled from on base PS5, the less of a chance they'll have at hitting 60fps on PS5 Pro as the head room won't be there.

 

[Tkumpathenurple]

Some reddit rumor was quite accurate (except the CPU clocks, CUs count). 50-60% more performance than PS5 is very close to 45%. GPU seems to be clocked at around 2ghz and reaches the 14 tflops range (which would make sense using 6nm, but I digress). Something is amiss with the 33.5 Tflops claim because 14*2 = 28, not 33.5.

So my question is, can the GPU be clocked higher (around 2180mhz instead of 2Ghz) for some specific tasks like dual-issue FP16 versus dual-issue FP32? Does it make any sense: is it consuming less doing FP16 than FP32?

256*54*2.45=33,868.8