There may need to be some sort of leapfrogging between the half generation and the next generation of hardware for Sony to make a big enough technological leap forward.

The PlayStation 6 may need the existence of the PlayStation 5 Pro for the expected technological leap to happen for a number of reasons, including the fact that producing faster and more complex CPUs and GPUs to increase the performance and functionality of the console is no longer entirely possible. This was recently discussed by Richard Leadbetter, an editor at Digital Foundry. With the PlayStation 4 Pro, Sony released a model where the GPU was twice the size for only $100 more.

Today, Sony can’t do that with the PlayStation 5 Pro, although it will be able to make a similar improvement with the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaler (with dedicated hardware). This is the path that PlayStation 6 and the next-generation Xbox are likely to take, as the cost per transistor has changed a lot over the years and there is no prospect of a major increase in the size of GPUs. And with artificial intelligence, it’s enough to see a smaller increase in hardware and performance.

AI-powered technology takes time to develop. When Nvidia released the DLSS-equipped GeForce RTX 2000 graphics cards (where ray tracing was added), not many people believed it at first. A few years have passed since then, and now upscaling technology is commonplace in many games, and ray tracing is becoming more common. It’s been a few years since the RTX 2000 cards, and it’s going to take that long for consoles to get AI technology as mature as Nvidia’s DLSS, so it’s a good idea that PSSR is debuting on the PlayStation 5 Pro and not the PlayStation 6.

The PlayStation 5 Pro will be released on November 7th for $700/€800, but that doesn’t include the price of the vertical stand or the Blu-ray drive.

Source: WCCFTech