There’s an interesting new claim that the PlayStation 5 Pro has to exist, because of a shortcoming of the original PlayStation 5.
As reported by WCCFTech, Kepler_L2 made this claim on Twitter. Kepler has been known in the past to share some rumors, but as an insider he really is better known for sharing insight on the tech industry. In particular, Kepler’s interest lies in the CPU and GPU side of the market.
Kepler’s claim is not based on some secret hidden insider information either. Instead, he simply makes the argument based on his knowledge of the tech industry, and the technology in the console.
To summarize, Kepler explains that hardware vendors that he follows, such as Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Apple, etc, have “converged” to making similar designs. This means, even if we see AMD CPUs outperform Intel’s in some situations, for example, for the developer, they are close to the same thing. This also means that any optimizations made for one company’s hardware will also apply to those made by other companies.
Lastly, Kepler points out that the many tools developers use, such as compilers, have improved to the extent that they can get most potential performance quite easily.
Now, in principle, this does look like it makes sense. The Nintendo Switch, which uses a bespoke Nvidia SOC, has enough things in common with architecture on AMD CPUs on their rival consoles, as well as other CPUs and SOCs, that it has enabled the platform to receive ‘impossible’ ports of games that on paper, shouldn’t be possible on the platform.
It’s easy to take this for granted, to dismiss that The Witcher 3 and Doom Eternal must be able to run on the Switch because they are ‘older’ games. But that disregards the time when the Wii U had terrible ports of games that were on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, like Splinter Cell Blacklist, or when the Vita couldn’t really run games like Borderlands 2 and Resident Evil Revelations 2.
We can trace a time from before Nvidia developed the tech that runs on the Switch, which is, a mobile CPU that could run technology that was previously only possible on desktops and consoles, such as Unreal Engine. That innovation would be duplicated by Nvidia’s developers, which is why we now see AMD SOCs running the Steam Deck, ROG Ally, etc.
But then, there is one thing that Kepler doesn’t account for, which is that some developers aren’t able to optimize the performance of the PlayStation 5 on their games. In situations like that, the issue lies with those developers, but it may be true that the effort to match what better optimized games can do on the console may not be worthwhile.
In any case, this isn’t a claim some PlayStation 5 owners may not take well. They were sold on the console on the claim of 60 FPS 4K performance, and most games on the platform now split that to either 60 FPS on a lower resolution, or 4K at a lower framerate. So it seems that that selling point wasn’t true after all. Did Sony marketing get ahead of actual performance, or did they overestimate what they and other studios could do with the hardware? But here and now, it seems that PlayStation 5 owners who really want the best performance have to buy a PlayStation 5 Pro now.
