Recently, Sony introduced the PlayStation 5 Pro gaming console. The company claims that the new console uses the most advanced AMD technology, which current Radeon video card models do not have. In this sense, the PS5 Pro is a cutting-edge device, especially when it comes to ray tracing.
Image Source: Sony
The PlayStation 5 Pro GPU contains 67% more processing units than the regular PlayStation 5. The new version of the console also supports image scaling technology and is equipped with faster GDDR6 memory. When it comes to ray tracing, Sony says the PS5 Pro is 2-3 times faster than the regular PS5. Some of this performance boost comes from the increased number of GPU compute units, but the bulk of the increase comes from architectural changes to the PS5 Pro.
According to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro chief architect Mark Cerny, Sony has “motivated” AMD to develop faster ray tracing hardware units for the PS5 Pro. These improvements should also appear in future Radeon graphics cards.
«PS5 Pro utilizes new advanced ray tracing feature sets that AMD has developed as the next step in their architecture roadmap. But if you look around, you won’t find any other AMD GPUs that offer the same features. We motivated this development and I’m very glad that we did it. The [game] developers were delighted,” Cerny said.
The Sony PlayStation 5 Pro is not built from “standard” AMD components. Sony led the development of the console and used the most advanced technology that AMD could provide. The new PS5 Pro also features support for PSSR AI image upscaling technology and appears to feature next-generation Radeon graphics.
And yet, this is still a PlayStation 5, and not a new generation of gaming console from Sony. The PS5 Pro still uses AMD Zen 2 processing cores, which allows it to maintain full architectural compatibility with the regular PlayStation 5. On the one hand, today, when AMD is already releasing processors based on Zen 5 cores, the APU of the PS5 Pro console looks outdated. However, Sony was limited in its hardware choices for the console, as otherwise it would have been a nightmare for PS5 and PS5 Pro game developers.