Yesterday, PlayStation released an intriguing video featuring Mark Cerny leading a PS5 Pro Technical Seminar at Sony Interactive Entertainment’s headquarters. As the system architect, Cerny delved into the intricate details of the PS5 Pro’s hardware, while also addressing some of the swirling rumors about the new console. He took a moment to talk about “FLOPflation” because an inaccurate figure of 33.5 TFLOPs had been leaked. This misunderstanding stemmed from a leaker who incorrectly assumed the hardware was making extensive use of RDNA 3 architecture.
In fact, the PS5 Pro manages to reach 16.7 TFLOPs compared to the PS5’s 10 TFLOPs. Interestingly, a legitimate leak before the release hinted that the PS5 Pro can achieve 300 TOPS in 8-bit calculations and 67 TFLOPS in 16-bit calculations. Cerny explained that the console employs an updated RDNA 2.X architecture, which is a customized version of AMD RDNA 2. This allows the use of some RDNA 3 features without necessitating code rewrites for the new hardware.
During the presentation, which you can catch on YouTube, Cerny highlighted that one of the most significant enhancements of the PS5 Pro is its new Ray Acceleration structure. It leverages a BVH8 (Bounding Volume Hierarchy), paired with improved “Stack management in hardware,” leading to more efficient and streamlined graphics shader code execution on the new system.
BVH is crucial in rendering 3D graphics through bounding boxes used in calculations like reflections. While the PS5 utilized BVH4 for ray tracing (grouping bounding boxes in sets of four), the PS5 Pro optimizes this with BVH8. Similarly, the Ray Intersection Engine has seen an upgrade from managing 4 boxes and 1 triangle (PS5) to handling 8 boxes and 2 triangles in the PS5 Pro.
Thanks to these enhancements in the PS5 Pro’s ray tracing hardware—a feat achieved using a highly tailored version of the RDNA 2 GPU architecture—the console offers impressive performance improvements in handling complex and curved light reflections, though only moderate advancements for shadows and flat reflections.
For those craving more technical insights, the complete 37-minute video is packed with valuable knowledge about the console’s market and the requisite technologies to stay competitive. It’s definitely worth a watch to get a deeper understanding of these innovations.
