I’ve got to admit, I was surprised to see Sony’s new PlayStation 5 Pro console capable of running games at 8K — even if it’s with AI-powered PSSR upscaling — but the company is making sure our expectations aren’t too high. Gran Turismo 7 will run at 8K on the PS5 Pro, which is exciting… but it won’t be every game.
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This is just a $699 console after all, and not some $6000+ gaming PC with a $2500+ graphics card that is magnitudes faster than the PS5 Pro. Anyway, in a new interview with IGN, PlayStation Senior Principal Product Manager, Toshi Aoki said that while the PS5 Pro has 8K gaming support, “that’s not our headline”.
Aoki explained: “So even with the PS5 Pro, we do have 8K games support, but that’s not our headline. It’s more of the cherry on the cake…if you are one of the small percentage of people who have an 8K TV, you could get that from supported games. It is something that we have to work together with developers and also the TV manufacturers in the future….But right now we are really focused on the main use cases, which is 4K TV owners having that high-level visual fidelity and playing at [60 FPS]”.
Aoki also confirmed that Sony has been working on the tweaked PlayStation 5 Pro console before the standard PS5 was released in November 2020. He added: “We started discussing it before the PS5 actually came out… because the PS5 specs were already locked in. We were ready to launch and everything. We knew, of course, as you mentioned, technologies evolve every year“.
- PS5 Pro runs cool and quiet, around 200W of power: The PS5 Pro has recently been rumored to use around 200W of power, the same power connector as the standard PS5, and it runs cooler thanks to tweaks from AMD and TSMC’s improved process node on the Viola SoC inside of the PS5 Pro.
- 45% faster than standard PS5: The new codenamed Trinity SoC is a beefed-up semi-custom design from AMD with a larger GPU and faster GDDR6 memory. The higher clock speeds on the GPU and some RDNA 4 tech are going to provide a huge upgrade in performance over the regular PS5.
- 2-3x faster in ray tracing than standard PS5: An increase of 45% in performance over the standard PS5 is impressive, but the new RDNA 4 GPU tricks inside of the PS5 Pro will reportedly provide an insane 2-3x performance increase on new “PS5 Pro Enhanced” games on a PlayStation 5 Pro console.
- AI-powered PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling tech: The new PS5 Pro console will have some AI technology (of course) which will power an exciting new AI upscaling technology: PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution — or PSSR — which means we’re going to see some of the best graphics we’ve seen out of a console yet with the PS5 Pro.
- PS5 Pro Enhanced label for games: Sony will have a new “PS5 Pro Enhanced” label for games, which will see games using PSSR to upscale the resolution to 4K, a constant 60FPS, and then add or increase ray tracing effects and performance.