Sony previously announced a figure for how much better the PlayStation 5 Pro could perform than the base model, but it sounds like PR hype from the company.

Sony has said that the PlayStation 5 Pro will perform about 45% better than the PlayStation 5, but that’s not what Digital Foundry’s weekly podcast is talking about. According to the editors, titles that didn’t get a PlayStation 5 Pro patch only got a 30-35% boost. It’s still unclear if Game Boost (essentially a compatibility mode) will offer all the features and full performance of the system, but it seems unlikely. The Xbox Series X, which is built on similar AMD hardware, offers full GPU performance when running the Xbox One X in a similar compatibility mode.

Therefore, it seems very much that the downside to better performance is nothing more than memory bandwidth limitations. This is similar to what we saw with the PlayStation 4 Pro. There, too, there was a 45% increase in GPU upgrades, but that was accompanied by only a 28% improvement in memory bandwidth. However, the imbalance was much worse on the previous half-generation console, and even when the system had the shading power, the console couldn’t achieve 4K resolution everywhere.

The memory bandwidth limitations of the PlayStation 5 Pro’s Game Boost are underscored by AMD’s use of the GPU. The increase in CUs (compute units) is happening in parallel with the increase in memory bandwidth and improvements in memory controllers that allow GPUs with larger caches to better handle high resolutions, including 4K. As a result, the PlayStation 5 Pro may later be able to achieve 120 fps at 1080p easily, but may struggle at higher resolutions because the higher the resolution, the more memory bandwidth is required.

The PlayStation 5 Pro was released a week ago and so far it seems to show significant improvements, especially for the patches planned for the console (God of War: Ragnarök, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth).

Source: WCCFTech