PS5 Pro Reveal Incoming
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Believe it or not we are past the halfway point this console generation, if we take The PS4/X1 generation as the template. And like that generation we are getting updated, Professionals only model of the console, in this case Sony is going solo in offering a 1st class console experience. The announcement is due tomorrow (10th September). So, should we be excited, who does it make sense for and how far can this console push the technology and gaming needle?
Learning From The Past
Going on the prior PS4 Pro, Mark Cerny led presentation on September 7th with a November 10th release date, almost 3 years after the launch of the PS4. Both consoles still live today with even brand-new games in Star Wars Survivor launching on both, later this month. The USP for the Pro was clear then though, offer a 4K output, by hook or by crook, for the booming market shift to 4K screens from the ubiquitous HD screens we had been playing on for the previous 10 years or so.
The Hook: push all games to 4K, offering the same or better quality at 4x the pixels, not a small ask.
The Crook: came in Sony’s own, hardware accelerated Checkerboard rendering, which used an ID buffer within the renderer to track geometry and thus pixels as they moved. The API enabled this as simple(er) hook in for the developers to take a sub 4K resolution, often half width and height interleaved per frame hence the checkerboard name, and then render each alternatively and use the inferred data from previous frames to fill in the blanks and present a clean, sharper and more appropriate 4K like image at a much smaller cost. Memory, bandwidth and Compute time the other. Its success was mired somewhat with a mixed level of uptake and success across the range of games, both pre and post launch, but it still managed to deliver a sizeable improvement on the PS4 baseline across a wide range of 1st and 3rd party games offering vastly increase image quality, performance, effects and sometimes multiple modes, not present on the rookie console format.
Where does the PS5 Pro fit in?
Who and what problem is the PS5 Pro solving you may ask. The market is very different now then in 2016, PC has now adopted and embraced reconstruction-based hardware and solutions and leads the way in quality, integration and support. As I discussed in my 2015 Battlefront preview video would, and has, become ubiquitous across almost all game engines and even APIs. With 4K being the main screen choice, along with 120Hz, Variable Refresh Rate and the king of all, Ray Tracing being the big-ticket items. The main problem for Sony is, by and large, the PS5 delivers all these with varying levels of success. This time the Pro model has a bigger hill to climb to stand out, but here is where the market focus comes in and the data part.
Looking at the PS4 total sales, from PlayStation own financial reporting, has sold approx. 117million, placing it 5th in the all-time best sellers (The PS2 is still the GOAT) but of that number approx. 17-20% came from the Pro model, meaning around 19-23 million PS4 Pros. The biggest inflection point was likely around 2018/19, but more importantly it added significantly to the PS4’s user-base, market penetration and strength alongside PlayStation revenue and profits. As a premium £349/$399 console, likely sold at a small profit, it also added a healthy boost to the bottom line. Coming in around £100/$100 more than the base PS4 it offered a big uplift for a small SKU change, in pure manufacturing costs. Many aspects such as the optical drive, PSU, controller and shell were the same or minor changes with the increase DDR3 ram, bigger drive and larger APU being the biggest. A perfect economies of scale and design benefit along the lines of their TV ranges.
But it had another angle, to entice PS3 owners staying on the fence and bring over the PC gamer OR stop console gamers migrating to PC which happens around the 3–4-year point of each console generation as PC starts to pull away in potential technology. I would estimate 20-25% of the total user-base of the Pro were upgrades from the PS4, I was, but I kept both for obvious reasons. But the rest where growth to that reachable market which helps everything from 3rd party deals, attachment rates, game sales, accessories and overall market growth. In addition, it helped VR quality, cemented their technical lead over Microsoft (well, until their X1X came the year later) and closed the gap to PC with 60fps and 4K talking points.
The Cost of Power
The PS5 Pro makes all the same arguments for itself and from a cost perspective, actually making an even healthier argument, as the manufacturing cost of the PS5 has not fallen like the traditional model. Plus, Sony sell directly which is -potentially- cutting or gaining a ~30% margin back from retailers and logistics, and the design of that same slim, as I noted in my review, is based on the Pro. Simply being a larger but close sibling of it right down to the optical add-on drive. Which I assume will be a limited-edition option at best or this will be fully digital with the, now, £100 drive being a simple plug and play option. Which will fit perfectly as will the custom side plates. Again, expanding their revenue streams to market but maximising everything within the supply chain. All this means the current £389/£479 price of the PS5 is likely only making a small profit when sold direct from Sony itself. The PS5 Pro is likely going to be £499 as a digital only device £589 with a drive and this will likely add double digit profit % for Sony on each unit sold, and may even be a direct only item at first and possibly even Digital only.
Get Me Off The Bench Coach
The bigger one though is cross generation and getting players off the PS4 who have remained since last generation (which the PS4 Pro also did). Teams can entice them by updating all games with free patches (which helps sales for publishers and Sony 30% platform commission alike) and sell more games that ship with a Pro mode. This is a lower development effort for, potentially, a huge increase in sales revenue (new owners will always buy games that maximise its benefits). Finally, the options offered up by the PS5 Pro mean that PlayStation can market, and teams can now ship, a closer parity on the higher end PC releases on the Pro model which is almost certainly going to focus on Sony’s own DLSS competitor in PSSR and the potential 4x Ray Tracing improvements, stopping the bleeding of their user base to PC or at least slowing it down to a trickle. So, now the fun part, how real is that prospect?
The Power of Dreams
From a Spec for Spec comparison, the (potentially) leaked info shows the aim is similar to the PS4 Pro. No longer doubling the GPU from the base though, instead a 50% gain if the 60 CUs is accurate and I expect 54 to be active for yields and the 60 comes from the developer units which are often more powerful than retail SKU’s. Then boost CPU and GPU clocks and offer up enhancements within the capabilities of the APU itself and gain power back and some cost from the node shrink to a 4nm die. As you can see, side by side we are looking at at circa 50% gain, on paper raw numbers, but as I always say that is not as important as many believe. The big gains will come from the RDNA 3/4 features, potential NPU to aid Machine Learning, although this could also be just architecture boosts within the GPU portion of the SoC, similar to the PS4 Pro Half-Precision updates. And the Ray Tracing enhancements that offer up, again only on paper, up to 4x increase in parts of the Ray Tracing pipeline and most importantly in the BVH data traversal, Ray Intersection and early eviction and shared compute and shader ALU load to improve utilisation across each and every cycle.
If Memory Serves
Helping the increases further is the circa 1.2GB given back to games, similar to the 1GB the PS4 Pro offered with its DDR3 ram. Of which 512mb went to games and 512mb went to the 4K UI. Here a far larger amount of RAM will almost certainly be used for the footprint cost of the PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) reconstruction solution and potential Ray Tracing benefits, but the rest will increase the potential BVH data size and texture quality for games which all adds up to pushing Pro games closer to the higher settings on PC and far higher on 1st Party titles alike. The 8-bit custom Machine Learning features within the PS5 Pro SoC offer up 300TOPS (Trillions of Operations per second) which is close to an RTX3080 level in regards to the Tensor cores Nvidia use for their industry leading DLSS solution via the same Int8 computation load, something used often for ML and AI workloads. These are better than pure software driven solutions such as FSR2 and XeSS on non Intel GPU’s as they can be more efficient, designed around the core hardware and APIs (Like DLSS) and run for a far cheaper cost and superior results, making them perfect for consoles. This feature alone could resolve an issue we see often within the 60+ fps modes in many 3rd party games, image quality. With games such as Star Wars Outlaws, Jedi: Survivor, Lords of the Fallen & even Final Fantasy 16 all potential game changers on the new console. And this could even improve the 30fps modes further if required, I expect this feature to be a key talking and demonstration point.
The observant amongst you may notice a similar weakness within the design, Bandwidth. Slightly better increase than before, we have a possible 576GB/s over the previous 448GB/s so 28.5% increase over the base PS5 model. The PS4 Pro was a similar but more modest 23% wider and that also came with DCC compression which helped a little. The PS5 Pro likely may also have some gains within its design, potential a larger L1 or L2 cache and certainly the use of the mooted PSSR should offer a possibility of a lower base resolution but a superior image quality, as we see with DLSS, which would also aid the memory footprint and bandwidth. The efficiency of the Ray Tracing hardware that I discussed in a previous Database on the Sony Patent, means we will see a wider wave front use, more samples per clock cycle, better Ray Intersection times, and faster traversal of the BVH data structure and even early eviction. All this means the console will be much faster, clock for clock, in doing the same work, but also wider, faster clocks and more efficient use which is why the Developer Documentation quotes a 2 to 4x increase in potential Ray Tracing performance. This will allow games to run the 30fps Ray Tracing mode at 60fps with better image quality or add more Ray Tracing and even path tracing into games. Which could run at the same or superior frame rates and resolutions. A prime example of this is the recent Witcher 3 next gen update that was released over a year ago, this offered Ray Traced Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion on consoles. But PC gained even more with Ray Traced reflections and shadows which could make significant increases to the visual impact. These could now be added into the PS5 Pro version via a patch and offer the best mode from the PC.
Is The Hype Train Incoming?
With mere hours to go we have but a short time to learn just how close these predictions are. That said I do expect the 9 minute or so planned video to give a clean, technical over-site of the key features, functions and enhancements the PS5 Pro will offer. Alongside some demonstrations using current games (Spider-Man, Horizon, God of War being possible contenders) but generally light on much more. We may not even see the PS5 Pro in the flesh until later, mirroring how PlayStation and Mark Cerny announce the PS4. I think it will be the start of a series of videos, articles and games being shown off leading up to the November 2024 release date, with a pre-order possibly being the final thing they WILL reveal today. What ever comes you can be sure I will be covering it here and in video form, so get ready to go Pro.