While the processor and RAM aren’t much of an improvement over the base model, the PlayStation 5 Pro will feel 100% more powerful than the regular PS5 thanks to upscaling.
In the latest episode of Moore’s Law is Dead Broken Silicon podcast, Alderon Games founder Matthew Cassells talked about the yet-to-be-announced system and how its power and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution scaling will improve games. Specifically for the studio’s games, the console could allow them to enable ray tracing if the game is already running at 60 FPS on the base model without ray tracing. In terms of resolution, the console’s extra power will allow games to be slightly less blurry than on the base model, but it won’t solve the problem entirely, and scaling will continue to play a big role in the grand scheme of things, as game engines like Unreal Engine 5 aren’t getting any faster and will continue to need scaling. PSSR, however, will make the PlayStation 5 Pro actually 100% more powerful than the base models, split between 50% actual improvements and the other 50% coming from scaling.
Discussing further the leaked PlayStation 5 Pro specs, the Alderon Games founder believes that the aforementioned limited CPU and RAM improvements won’t be a major issue, as the vast majority of console games aren’t bottlenecked by the CPU, and RAM scaling is usually one of the hardest things to do, as most developers optimize for the amount of RAM available, and only a few of the biggest games with the biggest development teams will be able to take advantage of the extra capacity. On the other hand, the GPU improvements could allow some games to run at the equivalent of epic settings instead of the medium settings typically used for the base model. The extra power could make it easier for developers to implement 120Hz modes with further tweaking of the graphics options.
