We have new rumors about the PlayStation 5 Pro’s GPU, collated by Eurogamer from various sources.
Eurogamer editor Richard Leadbetter looked at details that leaked from the developer portal, as well as other information Sony allegedly leaked to developers. Allegedly, the portal leaks revealed that the console has 30 Work Group Processors, that has a potential of 33.5 teraflops performance. In contrast, the PlayStation 5 available in the market now has 18 Work Group Processors, and can deliver 10.23 teraflops.
There are also improvements in the cache of the GPU. L0 cache goes up from 16 to 32 MB. Sony, sharing information to developers that was then leaked to Eurogamer, says the bigger L0 cache is for better ray tracing. L1 cache has doubled from 128 to 256 KB, to work with more compute units per shader engine. The L2 cache stays the same at 4 MB.
However, he expects that the PlayStation 5 Pro will not be able to optimize the performance on the GPU, in the same way that the PlayStation 4 Pro had more potential in its GPU than was actually used for its games. In the case of the PlayStation 5 Pro, it is expected that the GPU will be utilized the most on games that have ultra-boost mode.
Switching to ultra-boost will make the PlayStation 5 Pro raise its CPU clockspeed from 2.18 GHz to 2.35 GHz. The interesting thing is, the standard PS5 CPU has a clockspeed of 2.32 GHz. Leadbetter doesn’t completely know why that is, and it raises questions about the veracity of the information, or if there’s more that they just don’t know about the console yet. But his guess is that the lower clockspeed will have minimal impact on the games.
The Playstation 5 Pro’s GPU will also have full compatibility with DirectX12 Ultimate features, which the standard console only has partial support for. Leadbetter posits that with PSSR, Sony will be able to replicate the improved performance on PCs, found by combining extra compute power with machine learning based reconstruction.
Don’t worry if you didn’t fully understand the technical details revealed here. Even if Eurogamer claims this was sourced from developer resources, we don’t know for sure if this is what consumers will get in the final product they can get home. Even if the sourcing is legit, we won’t know if there have been changes since these documents were leaked, so all of these are tentative and are big fat maybes, in any case.
What you will want to know is this paints a picture of a PlayStation 5 Pro that is designed to really show a big performance boost in ultra-boost mode. The console packs a lot of power in its GPU, but that power is deliberately constrained, perhaps because games without ultra-boost mode won’t be able to use that surplus power anyway. The performance gap between the PS5 and PS5 Pro may also be comparable to the gap between the PS4 and PS4 Pro, so set your expectations to a reasonable level and let’s wait for when Sony announces this console even exists.
