Meanwhile, Sony has also been talking about the console itself, and while some of the hardware is a step into the past, the PlayStation 5 Pro is a step into the future with ray tracing.

The editors at Digital Foundry answered a fan question in their weekly podcast, and they say the reason CD Projekt RED (CDPR) didn’t make a PlayStation 5 Pro patch for Cyberpunk 2077 is because they didn’t have a clear way to improve image quality beyond using the console’s larger GPU, and dynamic resolution scaling is already handled by the PlayStation 5 Pro’s Game Boost feature.

Ray tracing could have been improved on the PlayStation 5 Pro, but because they were working with an older software development kit (SDK), CDPR did not have access to certain RT features and hardware optimizations, so they would have had to update their SDK before ray traced reflections or global illumination could be implemented in the game, but this could have led to additional problems that would have cost a lot of time and money. PlayStation’s Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) support would not have been worth it over AMD’s FSR.

According to Mark Cerny, the console’s lead architect, the PlayStation 5 Pro will continue to have an RDNA 2-based GPU for support, just like the base console. So games will run on both PlayStation 5s, but there are differences. The basic technology of the PlayStation 5 Pro, according to Cerny, is between RDNA 2 (shaders) and RDNA 3 (geometric pipelines). The latter is faster, but invisible to the game engine. If Sony had relied on the double floating-point speed of RDNA 3, developers would have had to write two pieces of code, and the company didn’t want to burden them with that.

It’s all about ray tracing. According to Cerny, the more advanced RT The hardware comes from a future generation of RDNA, and it first appeared on the PlayStation 5 Pro. He didn’t name it, but you can guess: it’s RDNA 4. The console has doubled the BVH performance and has new stack management hardware. The BVH performance boost results in a broad improvement in raytracing performance, while the new stack handler helps with complex reflections in particular. Cerny says, “It’s hard to give an exact speedup because it’s very dependent on the specifics of the application. But we typically see ray calculations that are double or triple the speed of PlayStation 5.

However, this performance boost includes the simple effect of the PlayStation 5 Pro’s 67% larger and more complex GPU compared to the base PlayStation 5. Cerny estimates that this alone translates into a real-world performance boost of about 45%. Considering that Sony claims ray tracing is typically between 100% and 200% faster on the PlayStation 5 Pro, it’s clear that much of the improvement is architectural rather than simply the result of adding 67% more functional units.

Incidentally, the console was released a month and a half ago.

Source: WCCFTech