Sony hasn’t officially said anything about the half-generation update, but if a video with many details about it has been removed from YouTube, citing copyright claims, it confirms the console’s existence…
Sony took down the Moore’s Law is Dead video from March when it detailed the PlayStation 5 Pro. Sony Interactive Entertainment requested the removal from YouTube, citing a copyright claim. With The Verge editor Tom Warren already saying that the console exists and that the certification process will begin this summer, it remains to be seen when it will be unveiled.
The Verge has reported on what a game needs to achieve to earn the PlayStation 5 Pro (Trinity) Enhanced badge. A graphics mode that is only available on this console will reportedly be mandatory, in addition to the usual quality and performance options. While Sony is pushing developers toward 4K resolution (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling technology could be good for this), 60 FPS, and better ray tracing, The Verge reports that these won’t be strictly mandatory (we’ve only heard this about the frame rate so far).
If developers offer a graphics mode that’s better than the base PlayStation 5, they could get that tag. For example, you can stay at 30 fps on the PlayStation 5 Pro, but a game with a fixed or variable frame rate (VRR), if it’s better, it will get the PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced badge. Or these two cases: Basic PlayStation 5: 1440p/30FPS; PlayStation 5 Pro: 4K. Basic PlayStation 5: variable 1080p-1440p; PlayStation 5 Pro: 1280p-2160p. If the frame rate increases from 30 to 60 or 120 on the more powerful console at the same resolution, or if ray tracing is turned on when it was not before, that would be sufficient.
Over the last few decades all hardware vendors have converged to very similar designs.
There is barely any difference in a CPU from Intel vs AMD vs Apple or a GPU from NVIDIA vs AMD vs Intel these days.
Any optimization for one vendor applies to all others.
— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) April 15, 2024
Not to mention that all the tools used by devs (e.g compilers) have improved massively over the years and can extract most of potential performance with ease.
Nobody does "to the metal" optimization these days because it's a) too hard b) largely unnecessary.
— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) April 15, 2024
Developers will need to release a patch for the PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced flag on their older games. Additionally, The Verge reports that the PlayStation 5 Pro will also have an Ultra Boost mode, which will result in better performance in many games even if they don’t receive this update. Additionally, AMD leaker Kepler took to Twitter to talk about the half-generation update. According to him, we are no longer in the 90s and 2000s, so consoles can no longer be considered exotic hardware (a role filled by the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 3).
Hardware manufacturers now build their products around similar designs, so there is not much difference between Intel and AMD solutions when you look at modern processors, and Nvidia and AMD are following a similar path with graphics cards. The tools that developers use have evolved a lot, so they can easily squeeze out the best performance.Today, there is no serious “to the metal” optimization because there is no need for it, but there is no spare in the consoles, and the need for the PlayStation 5 Pro is to push the visuals and performance in the console space.
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