I've been seeing a lot of opinions being written around the internet about how the PS5 Pro "feels unnecessary" and how we've "barely scratched the surface of the base PS5".
In my opinion this is absolutely the wrong lense to look at the PS5 Pro through.
These days software development cycles range between 4 to 10 years for large scale AAA projects. These are exactly the types of projects that tend to push the envelope in graphics and technological achievement. Let's take a look at one of the aspects where the PS5 Pro is said to focus: enhanced raytracing features.
For some context, let's look in the PC space where hardware accelerated raytracing is in its 3rd hardware generation in the nVidia Lovelace architecture (the 40-series of GPUs).
nVidia first released GPUs supporting raytracing acceleration in 2018 in the form of the Turing architecture, which was the 20-series. It was roundly criticized and one of their worst selling architectures because at the time there were zero games which supported raytracing, and the dedicated silicon requires to power the raytracing cores meant that the rasterized performance improvement was much less than people wanted.
Now here we are in 2024, closing in on 6 years since that first generation of RT hardware. We can count on one hand the number of AAA titles that aren't tech demos that utilize RT in a way that perceptibly improves visual presentation over standard techniques - even on PC. RT support is more plentiful in games, but unless you're comparing photo mode screenshots, most of the time you are sacrificing a ton of performance for marginal improvements.
What's the point of this case study? Well, the point is this: remember when the PS5 launched with all these cool new features like Dualsense haptics, 3D audio, next gen SSD and data streaming tech.... and then barely any games used it?
Sony is making the extremely necessary move to introduce features they'll be using in PS6 now in the PS5 Pro so that developers can start planning around them. We should see a much fuller transition phase as I expect stuff like the AI upscaling to be much more feature-rich in next gen, and developers will actually be including it close to the start of the gen instead of the features slowly trickling in.
In my opinion this is absolutely the wrong lense to look at the PS5 Pro through.
These days software development cycles range between 4 to 10 years for large scale AAA projects. These are exactly the types of projects that tend to push the envelope in graphics and technological achievement. Let's take a look at one of the aspects where the PS5 Pro is said to focus: enhanced raytracing features.
For some context, let's look in the PC space where hardware accelerated raytracing is in its 3rd hardware generation in the nVidia Lovelace architecture (the 40-series of GPUs).
nVidia first released GPUs supporting raytracing acceleration in 2018 in the form of the Turing architecture, which was the 20-series. It was roundly criticized and one of their worst selling architectures because at the time there were zero games which supported raytracing, and the dedicated silicon requires to power the raytracing cores meant that the rasterized performance improvement was much less than people wanted.
Now here we are in 2024, closing in on 6 years since that first generation of RT hardware. We can count on one hand the number of AAA titles that aren't tech demos that utilize RT in a way that perceptibly improves visual presentation over standard techniques - even on PC. RT support is more plentiful in games, but unless you're comparing photo mode screenshots, most of the time you are sacrificing a ton of performance for marginal improvements.
What's the point of this case study? Well, the point is this: remember when the PS5 launched with all these cool new features like Dualsense haptics, 3D audio, next gen SSD and data streaming tech.... and then barely any games used it?
Sony is making the extremely necessary move to introduce features they'll be using in PS6 now in the PS5 Pro so that developers can start planning around them. We should see a much fuller transition phase as I expect stuff like the AI upscaling to be much more feature-rich in next gen, and developers will actually be including it close to the start of the gen instead of the features slowly trickling in.
