Sony’s Mark Cerny Debunks PS5 Pro 33 TFLOPS Rumor, Dubbing It “Flopflation”

Sony just released a 30 minute video called the PS5 Pro Technical Seminar at SIE HQ. While the title might evoke some memories of a 7^th console generation meme, this turned out to be more than a simple lecture.

Around 7 minutes in, the presenter Mark Cerny directly addressed the rumor that the PlayStation 5 Pro’s GPU could run at 33.5 TFLOPS. As Cerny humorously claims, this leads to something he dubbed ‘flopflation.’

As we pointed out when the console launched last month, that rumor came from YouTube channel Moore’s Law Is Dead. Surprisingly, we also found out that video game news outlets like Insider Gaming and IGN vouched for that rumor.

Both claimed they were also able to confirm that this was information leaked from PlayStation’s developer portal. Of course, we found out that early that the rumor was false, as the PlayStation 5 Pro’s packaging and print materials clearly stated the GPU ran at 16.7 TFLOPs.

We’ll paraphrase Cerny’s statement below:

“One thing I’d like to clear up is the erroneous 33.5 teraflop number that’s been circulating for PS5 Pro. That number isn’t anywhere in our developer docs. It comes from a misunderstanding by someone commenting on leaked PS5 Pro technical information.

Part of the confusion comes from RDNA3 architectures having double the flops of RDNA2 architectures. Now to quote Digital Foundry on this topic, it’s a nice little bonus to have twice the flops, but it doesn’t do anything like double real world performance. So there’s a certain amount of flopflation going on here.

We did not bring in the doubled floating point math from RDNA3 because achieving that bonus in performance would require a recompile for PS5 Pro. And as I said, having two versions of each compiled piece of code would create more work than we’re comfortable asking the developers to do.

Here, then, are the correct stats for PS5 Pro. It’s pretty simple! PS5 Pro has 30 workgroup processors which is 67% more than PS5 has. So the flops should be 67% higher as well. If we assume a pretty common operating frequency of 2.17 GHz, the math works out to 16.7 teraflops on PS5 Pro.

Of course, teraflop numbers are pretty meaningless. What isn’t meaningless is the performance of the PS5 Pro GPU. 67% more work group processors means that we can create synthetic tests that show 67% faster processing.

In practice, though, there are a lot of factors involved, such as memory bandwidth or even how a particular game engine responds to the details of the new architecture. So a game team might be looking for something more like a 45% increase in rendering speed. That’s still a huge improvement.”

As we close the door on this particular rumor, we hope it serves as a cautionary tale for gamers, content creators, and apparently, also us, the gaming press. All that time the fans fought over this, all the energy spent in verifying leaks and rumors, it was all for nothing, because the rumor was never true to begin with. And this certainly seems like a lesson on skepticism that Nintendo, Xbox, and Valve fans could take from Sony fans, if they care to pay attention.

If you’ve gotten this far, you may actually want to watch Cerny’s full presentation. You can go ahead and click on it below.