The PlayStation 5 celebrated its third birthday final month, with Sony marking the occasion by releasing a chassis refresh (aka the unofficially named PS5 Slim). With that each one out of the best way, the interwebs hearsay community is now in ‘PS5 Professional’ mode and there is a lot speak about what the beefier mannequin could have inside its case. So let me convey you on top of things on what the present specs are purported to be and what this might imply for PC gaming, if any of it occurs to be true.
Identical to Wccftech and Videocardz, I have been following the path of PS5 Professional gossip on X/Twitter, following the standard crowd of respected leakers. However let me simply lower to the chase and summarise what’s been stated up to now. To start with, the CPU contained in the all-in-one chip made by AMD will nonetheless be a Zen 2 design, comprising eight cores and 16 threads. The increase clock is reportedly going to be 4.4GHz, which is 0.9GHz greater than the usual PS5.
Not surprisingly, a lot of the modifications are anticipated to be within the GPU. The PlayStation 5 makes use of a customized design, based mostly on the RDNA 2 structure that powers the Radeon RX 6000 sequence of graphics playing cards. It isn’t an enormous graphics processor, with simply 2,304 shaders and a lift clock of two.23GHz.
The PS5 Professional’s GPU is seemingly going to be based mostly on RDNA 3 however with some parts from RDNA 4. To extend the rendering capabilities, the shader depend goes to be elevated to round 3,712 (some sources are saying greater, others claiming it to be decrease) however the increase clock will drop to 2GHz, to maintain the ability consumption down. On condition that RDNA 3 compute items may be dual-issued with instructions, it is doubtlessly an infinite improve of shading capacity.
However as we have seen with the Radeon RX 7000 graphics playing cards, video games cannot all the time utilise that twin challenge operate on a regular basis, and customarily talking RDNA 3 GPUs aren’t vastly higher than RDNA 2 ones. That stated, 60% extra shaders can be very nice to have, even when they are not clocked as excessive.
One other massive hearsay is that the brand new GPU design will use the ray tracing items from RDNA 4, which is claimed to have devoted {hardware} for doing bounding quantity hierarchy (BVH) traversals.
All of Nvidia’s RTX playing cards have such a factor however this is able to be new for AMD, and it is considerably overdue. Its present GPUs do all of those calculations by way of the shaders, which is partly why the ray tracing efficiency of Radeon playing cards is not nearly as good as it’s with GeForce fashions.
The weakest hearsay claims centre round two issues: ray shader reordering and an built-in AI processor. The primary is offered in Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace structure and it helps increase the efficiency of ray tracing, however I’ve not seen a lot settlement that the PS5 Professional chip could have this.
Nonetheless, ought to all of the ray tracing rumours become true, then we might be in for a pleasant shock with AMD’s subsequent technology of Radeon graphics playing cards. If RNDA 4’s ray tracing capabilities are simply nearly as good as Intel or Nvidia, then 2024 might be a very thrilling 12 months for GPUs. Now that may be one thing for PC players to look ahead to.
As for the AI chip, there are conflicting claims that the console’s APU will sport the identical NPU that AMD embeds into a few of its cellular Ryzen chips. What it will be used for is accelerating a machine studying upscaling system, proprietary to Sony however comparable in scope to Intel’s XeSS and Nvidia’s DLSS.
Let’s assume that the entire claims are true and the PS5 Professional seems late in 2024 with the entire rumoured options and new tech. What, if something, would this imply for PC gaming? To reply this query, we first want to contemplate how builders would utilise the brand new options for PlayStation-only video games.
With the PS4 Professional, there have been no video games ever launched simply for that console, as far I can recall. In different phrases, video games have been developed for the PS4 after which given particular enhancements (both instantly or later, by way of a patch) for the Professional model. It will very a lot be the identical for the PS5 Professional, as the usual PlayStation 5’s consumer base is so massive that no writer would fund a recreation only for a model new console that is by no means going to promote in the identical type of numbers as the usual mannequin.
These recreation enhancements are prone to come within the type of a toggle that both boosts body fee over the usual model (e.g. 120 fps as a substitute of 60 fps) or permits a better degree of graphics high quality, equivalent to extra ray tracing results or higher 4K output.
PC variations of PlayStation-only video games, equivalent to The Final of Us Half 1, God of Conflict, and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Aside, have not all been a easy translation, particularly on the subject of {hardware} necessities and efficiency. That first recreation I’ve simply talked about is very demanding when all of the graphics are set to most. So, does that imply a PC port of a recreation with PS5 Professional options shall be much more difficult in your {hardware}?
Probably however the further capabilities of the Professional would possibly give PC customers a better time of issues. To get the perfect efficiency out of the usual PS5, builders need to make use of every kind of specialized tips and routines, all distinctive to Sony’s platform, that do not essentially translate effectively to Home windows-based computer systems. However with a big increase in rendering chops, a Professional enhancement would possibly want fewer such tips to get by and that may be simpler to port throughout.
Nonetheless, I believe that what shall be used closely on the Professional, way more so than in a regular PS5 recreation, is ray tracing and upscaling. The latter is just about the norm for all new video games nowadays, in order that’s not going to be an issue except it makes use of one thing very distinctive to Sony. Ray tracing, although, is a distinct beast solely and on condition that the majority of PC players aren’t utilizing top-end GPUs, any recreation that closely depends on that graphics expertise will definitely be severely demanding on a PC.
Luckily, irrespective of how highly effective the PS5 Professional seems to be, the overwhelming majority of video games which might be created for the PS5 and PC, or ported from one to the opposite, will nonetheless be created with the usual console in thoughts. I’ve little question which means we’ll nonetheless see some rotten ports over the subsequent few years however they will not all be like that (fingers crossed).