Sony's PS5 Pro

[Music] this is T all right we are back from the break and now it's time to talk about something you may or may not have heard about uh but Sony definitely wants you to know about it is the new PS5 Pro joining us to talk about what's new and what you can expect from the device is Kyle Orland joining us from RS Technica welcome back to the show Kyle hey thanks for having me Micah yeah pleasure to have you here so I would love to just get right into it um first and foremost we've got a new PS5 Pro and that must mean that it's got new stuff going on what are the key hardware upgrades for this device and how do they actually enhance gaming performance compared to the PS5 that people fought tooth and nail to get when it first came out yeah this upgrade is all about Graphics they're focused on a larger GPU uh which has I have the numbers here to the side 45% faster rendering 67% more compute units 28% fast video Ram uh it all just means better graphics uh the Target that Sony focused on in their presentation was kind of getting rid of that choice between performance mode and Fidelity mode so Fidelity mode would have higher resolutions but maybe limited to 30 frames per second performance mode you'd get that smooth 60 frames per second but you might see resolutions a little lower they want the Best of Both Worlds they want approaching 4K Graphics at 60 frames per second in uh the highest end games and that's what they're promising the PS5 Pro will deliver approaching 4K Graphics um can you tell me what that how that translates if I have a I mean many a modern TV that has is a 4K television I plug in this PS5 Pro it does 60 frames per second you know it supports 60 frames per second what am I working with in one of these games so it totally depends on the games you know I wasn't counting the lines of pixels or anything on this they have to wait until it comes out to get the full uh Spectrum but you know some of the games might be natively 1440p instead of you know 2,000 lines uh they do have an upsampling system there called uh pssr Playstation spectral super resolution I think it stands for and that's they say it's an AI powered upscaling algorithm where it looks at the raw pixels and kind of fills in those pixels to get it to a 4K image automatically you know trying to figure out what color would go on that little edge of the line and then smooth it out um this is especially useful they say crowd scenes like for far off things in distance in a game like Ratchet and Clank you might see sharper people in the stands I'm not sure how much that's really going to impact the average viewer unless you're sitting very close to a very large screen uh I'm not really sure that you'll be able to pick out that kind of of upsampling you might get kind of a a feeling for it you might think oh something is a little different here but with the AI super sampling I've seen it can get a little fuzzy it's not really a night and day difference that they might want you to think understood now let's talk about what for me as a person who's not super steeped in graphics performance and gpus and and everything else Ray tracing seems like quite the buzzword and it seems like it it's a to hearing every big tech company talk about AI right now um tell can you just give me a basic understand of rate tracing and then what is going on with the PS5 Pro uh in terms of its improved GPU and how that is uh ramped up in terms of rate tracing and higher frame rates raate tracing simplest way of thinking of it is is calculating every ray of light coming from a light source and how it bounces off uh a number of things in the environment sometimes you know up to five seven bounces so like on a shiny car in Grand Turismo before you would see oh it's it's kind of reflective but now you'll actually see the reflection of the car next to you in rate tracing and that reflection will will bounce back and so forth um it it ends up being much more realistic uh you your your mind tends to notice when these things aren't reflecting correctly because you have a lifetime of experience seeing shiny objects uh reflecting the world where they've had to come up with tricks before rate tracing um the PS5 Pro says it'll be I think 50% faster at this so you can have the rate tracing effects while keeping that 60 frames per second you might be able to do rate tracing in more games uh you might have more realistic shadows in a game because it also calculates when the light isn't hitting something like if it's blocked by a tree or another wall um I think that is the kind of thing you'll notice if you turn rate tracing on or off in a game you really can see oh it's you know it's not sharper or anything but it just looks more realistic it looks more like you're used to things looking in the real world um I think with the extra power of the PS5 Pro I hope more developers will be able to use it without you know taking a frame rate hit understood now I would imagine that this num this list is going to increase over time uh what games are set to be quote PS5 Pro enhanced and then or maybe you can name a couple and then what exactly is that going to mean how will they take advantage of the new hardware yeah I think there was a list of uh they said 50 games would be available in pretty much all the biggest ones you can name will have it Spider-Man 2 Ratchet and Clank uh Last of Us Part Two um I'm trying to remember what else was on there but the biggest games will definitely get these enhancements I think as time goes on and the PS5 Pro gets into more households more Developers maybe smaller developers will also get those enhancements but Sony also says that even if you don't tune the game for these enhancements you will be able to get uh upscaling upgrades on games that are not tuned for it or even older PS4 games will supposedly look better with a PS5 Pro um so we'll see how that goes once we have it in our hands of course understood now you did mention uh the pssr PlayStation spectral super resolu ution um so is this an upscaling system that they just have kind of given a unique name um and how would it compare then to something like for example again this is coming from uh a lay person a DV and I mean a literal DVD not even Blu-ray a DVD player that has 1080p upscaling for example yeah that's a good uh comparison if you have an old DVD that not even a Blu-ray that you know was designed for your tube TV and uh you have an upscaling Blu-ray player it it won't you know make it look like a Blu-ray you will definitely tell the difference if you had a something that was sampled at that 1080p but it'll make it look nicer it'll make it look a little sharper around the edges um and that's what you'll pretty much see with the pssr it's the same type of thing that Nvidia has been doing for a long time with super sampling on its Graphics drivers and the idea is that it allows the game itself to be rendered at a lower resolution and then it kind of fills in the gaps quickly which allows for again faster frame rates um yeah I I really want to see how this looks uh when it's actually in my living room because in the past I've seen sometimes it works very well and sometimes you see a lot of kind of fuzziness kind of cross-hatch patterns where the AI is trying to fill in pixels and it's not really doing it well things have improved recently uh as machine learning is getting better and uh hopefully Sony has learned from some of that uh experience understood now let's talk about the big thing that sticks out here uh the thing that seems to be getting people upset um pricing how does the PS5 Pro's pricing and kind of its positioning as this Elite uh Graphics package compared to other consoles that are on the market you know the Xbox series X Xbox series s and maybe even upcoming Hardware that we are expecting from Nintendo um or other other players in the space because there are also a lot of mobile um device manufacturers that are that are working on you know making their consoles better where where does this fit in the lineup and what do you think about the price with your knowledge of kind of the gaming landscape yeah so the PS5 Pro is being offered at $700 and that is without a disc drive if you want to play discs you have an extra $80 on top of that uh so when you compare that to $450 for the disf free PS5 that's a big ask $250 extra dollars um at that price it's it's really going to be for the the graphics heads the people who really want top-of-the-line price is not important you know Sony did this before with the pss4 pro and as another mid generation upgrade that also cost more I think the PS4 Pro ended up being about 20% of all PS4s sold so this is not the mass Market device this is for the niche even within console Gamers of people who want just the best of the best um that said there is a bit of sticker shock there I think the last $700 console was the 3dio back in the 90s and that's when $700 was you know a huge amount and the 3DO obviously failed very quickly partly because was so expensive um but you know but $700 is not what it used to be um you know just if you adjust for inflation since the PS5 launched the uh $500 that it cost then is more like $600 uh in today's money so you know I can see why they're charging that much but also I don't think they're really aiming for a mass market price here they they're aiming at people where price is pretty much No Object they just want to show off they they want to know I have the best graphics and they also want to know that this is a product that will last into the future that um you know in four years maybe $700 will not seem as much or maybe they'll be able to reduce the cost and this is preparing for that kind of inter egum between when the ps6 eventually comes out got it and then last but not least I'll ask you with the PS5 Pro being a mid generation upgrade um what do you think it says about Sony's strategy for extending the PS5 life cycle as opposed to you know ps6 and Beyond right yeah like I said they did this before with the PS4 Pro but that didn't really extend how long the PS4 was on the market it was still the same six or seven years that we've seen uh between major console releases and you know that was partly driven by Microsoft releasing their new console you know both of them saw each other and said oh they're releas they're thinking about a new console we have to do ours now this time around Microsoft is not doing a mid generation upgrade or has shown no signs of it yet at least um so that leads to an interesting scenario you know if Microsoft has been releasing more of its games on other consoles it's uh sales of the Xbox have been cratering well below expectations there's a chance that we might not see another Xbox or it might not be um pushing the state-of-the-art anymore they might go more of a switch route to focus on Portables or something if there isn't that push for Sony it's hard to know where they're going to go with their next generation will they want to release a ps6 as quickly will the diminishing returns that they're getting from investing in all this Hardware kind of lower the number of people who want a top-of-the-line system you know Nintendo's new Switch will be coming out next year most likely if and there's the steam deck as a competition too now it's it seems like there's a a Divergence between you know PS5 pro at the high end really serving those people who care about having the most and then things like the switch and the steam deck where it's it's lower end but it's more convenient because you can play it portably and because it's much cheaper uh so there's going to be a real Divergence in the market there and what Microsoft does will have a large impact on how quickly I think Sony will move makes sense um Kyle I want to thank you so much for taking some time to join us y today to talk us through the PS5 Pro uh helping me truly understand what R tracing means and why it matters and also uh some great details on uh Playstation spectral super resolution and what upscaling means when it's when we're talking about something at this level uh of course folks could should head over to ars.com to check out the great work that you're doing is that the place that they should go to keep up with uh what you're doing or do you have any place online that they can go as well yeah that's where all my professional writing goes you can also find me on Blue Sky kyle. Land which is uh my fun little URL that I just got yeah that's good yeah and um yeah see you online awesome thank you so much Kyle we appreciate it [Music] [Applause] [Music]