Sony PlayStation 5 Pro

[Boss]

I believe there's room for introducing $599 consoles, but no higher.

if they’re going to launch at $599, they better have a bunch of games to show it off. Nobody is spending $599 with no payoff. Sony’s got to go back and introduce updates to their back catalog as well as provide incentives to developers to update the most frequently played games.

 

[eastmen]

You can’t. There’s no TAM for that and it would go out of business. Console purchasers are extremely price sensitive. The device can do nothing but play games. People won’t spend $1000+ on a console.

AMD greatest market are console players and handheld devices in the GPU side of things. There’s a very specific reason why AMD makes the design choices that they do, they are designed to save silicon space at the cost of performance in which they hope developers can somehow claw it back through optimization. The cheaper console will always sell more than expensive one.

I disagree.

There is a market for $1600 video cards so there is a market for consoles priced higher than $500. The console just has to bring enough of a performance delta that people will be willing to purchase it. Halo products are popular in a lot of markets. There will be people who are perfectly happy buying a $700 or $800 console , maybe even up to $1000

 

[davis.anthony]

I can't fathom how PS5Pro has 2~4x the RT performance of PS5 without a new ray-triangle hardware thingy and some very large L3 cache.

I wonder if they're being sneaky and there's an astrix?

2/3x RT increase*

*Using resolution drop and PSSR

 

[Charlietus]

Look at the charts above, AMD aren't a generation behind Nvidia, they're multiple generations behind Nvidia.

I don't think AMD will ever catch up, even Intel, on their 1st attempt came up with hardware that's faster at RT than AMD's.

There are two futures for AMD graphics cards: one where they develop a dedicated RT acceleration unit, and the other where they keep reusing existing hardware and shaders to do the trick.

It doesn't matter if they are multiple generations behind, when (if) they introduce a dedicated RT core they will already be most of the way there.
Who knows if PS5 pro already has it, with those 2-4x claimed speedups.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

I wonder if they're being sneaky and there's an astrix?

2/3x RT increase*

*Using resolution drop and PSSR

Going from a RT unit capable of BVH4 to BVH8 plus going from 36 CUs to 60 explains the 2x-3x improvement and allows for wider BVH structures with less cache stress.

 

[trinibwoy]

We could develop entirely new hardware accelerators, or come up with a way to use magnitude order less silicon to do the same amount of computation

This is exactly what I expect to happen. The 4090 isn’t the optimal raytracing architecture and there’s still lots of room for improvement. The big gains will come from better arch and better apis not just more transistors.

 

[RDGoodla]

Cyberbunk ULTRA RT has 1080p 68~69fps with a 4070.

We can expect PS5 Pro has similar RT graphic.

Page 2 | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review: an RTX 3080 challenger for $599

The Digital Foundry review of the Nvidia RTX 4070, looking at performance, power efficiency, RT, DLSS 3 and more. This page: design, power efficiency testing.

www.eurogamer.net

 

[Dictator]

Cyberbunk ULTRA RT has 1080p 68~69fps with a 4070.

We can expect PS5 Pro has similar RT graphic.

Page 2 | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review: an RTX 3080 challenger for $599

The Digital Foundry review of the Nvidia RTX 4070, looking at performance, power efficiency, RT, DLSS 3 and more. This page: design, power efficiency testing.

www.eurogamer.net

Unless the PS5pro has things like SER, traversal accelleration, or Opacity Micromaps... i would wait a bit before we start saying what RT performance it has...

 

[iroboto]

I disagree.

There is a market for $1600 video cards so there is a market for consoles priced higher than $500. The console just has to bring enough of a performance delta that people will be willing to purchase it. Halo products are popular in a lot of markets. There will be people who are perfectly happy buying a $700 or $800 console , maybe even up to $1000

from my POV the TAM for a 4090 is quite large owing to:
a) High End performance gamers
b) Machine Learning AI industry
c) Cryptocurrency
d) Content Creation / Video encoding / Video Streaming / Video Game Streaming / Live Streaming

I think anyone would tell you that the 4090 excels at all of these, and if you are doing work in categories b to d, its hard to find a better card for it. There's actual reasons to own a 4090 outside of just pure gaming, whereas you don't even have a calculator on a console today. Quite frankly the price point is probably pretty off putting for gamers, but the industry work, that's probably a price point they are willing to pay to get the job done faster. I'm pretty sure the DF team can add some insight here on how much faster a 4090 encodes.

 

[Karamazov]

yeah because if we go by the piece of info we have and CP77 PS5, it's up to 4x the RT perf of PS5 in CP77 which is barely used for shadows for interiors...so not much.

 

[iroboto]

I think we should be able to squeeze 4090 performance into console form factor at 1nm which is what I expect the final Playstation to use. It’s quite a shrink from 5nm. We also have to factor in architectural improvements that can come over the next 5 years. Don’t forget, Nvidia hasn’t made any significant improvements to its graphics architecture since 2018. They just increase the RT and tensor core throughput and continue to add SMs.

I do agree it can be shrunk to that size with eventuality, there's no doubt there, but can they cool it or keep the power level below a certain threshold at the 499 price point?

Maybe I'm over cautious about it, but imo, we cannot violate physics here. We are not yet capable of building an arc reactor which produces as much power as a nuclear reactor in the size of a donut with passive cooling.
That being said the power density of a 3090TI is about 1W/mm2. I suspect the 4090 is significantly higher. The silicon can take the heat, but getting the heat away from the chip is the issue. Unless consoles start moving to liquid cooling, it's going to be an issue I think - and with a liquid cooler, you're going to still require a large radiator to pull the heat off of it. It just makes a console, very... uhh... not behave like a console.

 

[orangpelupa]

from my POV the TAM for a 4090 is quite large owing to:
a) High End performance gamers
b) Machine Learning AI industry
c) Cryptocurrency
d) Content Creation / Video encoding / Video Streaming / Video Game Streaming / Live Streaming

I think anyone would tell you that the 4090 excels at all of these, and if you are doing work in categories b to d, its hard to find a better card for it. There's actual reasons to own a 4090 outside of just pure gaming, whereas you don't even have a calculator on a console today. Quite frankly the price point is probably pretty off putting for gamers, but the industry work, that's probably a price point they are willing to pay to get the job done faster. I'm pretty sure the DF team can add some insight here on how much faster a 4090 encodes.

Not sure how d is best with 4090.

Isn't the top of the line is still Intel quicksync for video encoding/transcoding?

IIRC Nvidia artificially limited the max simultaneous video encoding to just a few. Instead of unlimited in Intel (assuming you have powerful enough Intel gpu or igpu)

 

[iroboto]

Not sure how d is best with 4090.

Isn't the top of the line is still Intel quicksync for video encoding/transcoding?

IIRC Nvidia artificially limited the max simultaneous video encoding to just a few. Instead of unlimited in Intel (assuming you have powerful enough Intel gpu or igpu)

yes that's correct. But that doesn't make the 4090 necessarily not desirable because of it. It's still a monster. You're going to have a hard time finding other cards that can stream 4K60 lossless 4:4:4.

Regardless you can probably add just flat out 'rendering' power to companies that perform a lot of rendering work, a 4090 is still pretty good to have around if you don't want to pay data center rates.

All I'm saying is that the 4090 has a wide addressable market where many professionals would be willing to pay for that card and that's why it's at the price point that is and can still be considered both profitable and successful.

 

[davis.anthony]

Cyberbunk ULTRA RT has 1080p 68~69fps with a 4070.

We can expect PS5 Pro has similar RT graphic.

Page 2 | Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 review: an RTX 3080 challenger for $599

The Digital Foundry review of the Nvidia RTX 4070, looking at performance, power efficiency, RT, DLSS 3 and more. This page: design, power efficiency testing.

www.eurogamer.net

The 7700XT PS5 Pro's GPU is likely based on is 30% slower at RT than the RTX 4070.

 

[Nesh]

I disagree.

There is a market for $1600 video cards so there is a market for consoles priced higher than $500. The console just has to bring enough of a performance delta that people will be willing to purchase it. Halo products are popular in a lot of markets. There will be people who are perfectly happy buying a $700 or $800 console , maybe even up to $1000

Then you should ask yourself why successfull console platform providers have been avoiding such high prices

 

[fehu]

Then you should ask yourself why successfull console platform providers have been avoiding such high prices

Because until now there has been some competition

 

[Nesh]

Because until now there has been some competition

That's a very simplified argument. Elaborate in detail

 

[iroboto]

Because until now there has been some competition

nah, the sales are starting to slow for PS5 because that price hasn't come down enough. Price is the ultimate factor, if they started dropping 699 PS5s, people would game on cheaper devices

 

[davis.anthony]

I disagree.

There is a market for $1600 video cards so there is a market for consoles priced higher than $500. The console just has to bring enough of a performance delta that people will be willing to purchase it. Halo products are popular in a lot of markets. There will be people who are perfectly happy buying a $700 or $800 console , maybe even up to $1000

And those people will then look at what PC they can get for $700, 800 or even $1000, see the much larger library on PC and potential for 60fps+ and buy a PC instead.

 

[rntongo]

I disagree.

There is a market for $1600 video cards so there is a market for consoles priced higher than $500. The console just has to bring enough of a performance delta that people will be willing to purchase it. Halo products are popular in a lot of markets. There will be people who are perfectly happy buying a $700 or $800 console , maybe even up to $1000

There's less than 5% of gamers with $1600 GPUs. There is a market for higher priced consoles but its quite small. Especially now with longer SDLCs, and marginal improvements in GPUs. You dont get a 2x improvement in visual fidelity(which is the most important thing) by having a 2x more powerful GPU. A much smarter strategy is to launch a powerful handheld at the end of a gen that can run the games of that current gen and cross gen titles of the next. So a $500 PS5 pro and then in 2027 launch a $500 handheld then in 2028 launch a new gen with cross gen titles that can run in decent form on the last gen console and the relatively new handheld. People are more likely to pay for a handheld device actually.