A new day, a new PlayStation 5 Pro rumor. This one promises the moon, but we will warn about several reasons to be skeptical about it.
We are reporting on this rumor as it corroborates yesterday’s report that the industry allegedly is expecting Sony to announce and release a PlayStation 5 Pro this year. Such an announcement may make up for the lack of AAA 1st party releases for the coming financial year, at least in the eyes of gamers, if not necessarily for investors.
As reported by Tech4Gamers, Moore’s Law is Dead, a YouTuber with a mixed reputation on leaks, has confirmed with NXGamer that the PlayStation 5 Pro will have AI capabilities, a feature unavailable on the PlayStation 5 out in the market now. The console will use AI for AI-based upscaling, as well as ray tracing. The rumor goes on that NXGamer believes that with its enhanced technology, Sony will market the PlayStation 5 Pro of being capable of outputting at 4K 120 FPS.
Now, of course, you likely already know that Sony already marketed the PlayStation 5 with this capability to output at 4K 120 FPS. In practice, gamers have been repeatedly disappointed by releases that end up not being able to perform beyond 30 FPS. Most of the games that have released in this console generation come with quality and performance modes. Players have to choose to get 60 FPS at a lower resolution, or 30 FPS to output to as high as 1440p.
Now, the big potential difference that AI comes to the PlayStation 5 Pro that would make this possible is frame generation. On the current PlayStation 5, frame generation is made possible by FSR 3.0. However, this has to be implemented on a per-game basis and it comes with an issue we’ll discuss below.
AMD has a newer AI-based frame generation technology, called Fluid Motion Frames. Fluid Motion Frames is available on gaming PCs with an RX 6000 or 7000 GPU now, and could boost performance to as much as 97 percent on specific DirectX games at 1080p, and as much as 103 percent for an even smaller set of games at 1440p.
Whether you’re using FSR 3.0 or Fluid Motion Frames however, AI frame generation technology introduces lag. Yes, the reason you are looking for better performing chips to play games, to run at 60 FPS, would be rendered pointless because of the added lag.
AMD has a Radeon Anti-Lag feature, but it’s still one of those things where you would be better off playing a game at 30 FPS, with no added frames and lag to compromise response times.
So there’s reason to be skeptical of these rumors, even if it turns out to be true. The alleged big motivator for Sony and Microsoft to release Pro versions of their consoles is the pending release of Grand Theft Auto VI, which is expected to be a windfall for the industry. It remains to be seen if Rockstar is making their next GTA such that it requires that gamers buy an upgrade console like the PlayStation 5 Pro.
