Digital Foundry on the PS5 Pro: GTA 6 & Others Unlikely to Hit 60FPS

the PlayStation 5 Pro was just revealed and joining us today is Richard Leb better from digital Foundry it is an honor having you on the show today to discuss the technology and your reaction to this reveal so what were your thoughts uh well first of all welcome thanks for having me um well Where Do We Begin I think it's a tricky one right because um the price is is crazy high we've never seen a console that's quite this expensive before and the presentation was kind of weird it wasn't like any Mark Cy presentation I've seen in the past before this guy is an a technology evangelist he's got a vision for the future of gaming and typically he's given the opportunity to express that Vision in his own words with no real limits on you know the topics he's going to cover so um the day before uh the transmission um you know it said oh it's going to be 9 minutes long it's like well you know the road to PlayStation 5 was 52 I went back and looked at uh the PlayStation meeting 2016 where they talks about uh PS4 Pro that was getting on for an hour as well so um initially my thought my thoughts were well how much can he actually talk about in um in nine minutes and secondly they've got a real problem here because they've got to talk about an enhanced PlayStation experience but at the same time they can't say that the standard PlayStation experience is in any way deficient so I thought that the way that they would do this would be to talk about the base PlayStation 5 first and then go on to the pro which is exactly what they did which is fine except that cut further into the 9 minutes so I guess we got maybe seven minutes of PS5 Pro really high level stuff here and we actually know a lot more about the machine based on the leaks that started like March 2024 and that was a little disappointing because we've got like the barest details but we don't have any context we don't have the vision behind of uh those details so that was uh slightly Odd as well and um you know if we go back to the PlayStation meeting for PS4 Pro we had a similar presentation that was a bit lacking on YouTube uh where you know they were trying to talk about the benefits of 4K in HDR without having 4K in HDR and now they're talking about sort of um this enhanced experience and then they're trying to shoehorn that into a pretty compromised YouTube stream and that didn't quite work for me now at that event we had 3 hours afterwards to actually go Hands-On with the machine there was no hands on this time around there was a CNET um opportunity an exclusive opportunity that didn't really leave me any much the wiser so you know I think it's almost like a retrograde step compared to both the PS5 reveal which was necessarily impacted by covid there's not much that could be done there and then going back to the PlayStation 4 Pro it was kind of deficient compared to that as well because nobody's actually seen it apart from the guy at CNET the guy at CNET liked it we know that well great that's that's awesome I'd like to I'd like to see that myself um I think another thing which um which sort of uh caused issues for me is that the uh the representative software was used um in the the presentation um wasn't the best choice because the first party games are actually really good on the base PlayStation 5 they aren't really you know the upgrades are going to be far less pronounced than let's say for example some of the Unreal Engine 5 uh blurry games that didn't hit 60 frames per second um those would have been much better candidates for showing the advantages of the machine right and well what could I say I'm I'm really sort of bagging on it um but you know I probably would have done things a lot differently if I were in charge of it um yeah well maybe you maybe you could dive into that a little bit because I look at it and I'm like okay you keep talking about sharpness or you're talking about rate tracing but you're not really showing us like where is the rate tracing in this shot of Star Wars at the beginning of the presentation it's just sort of water that's not the best example of reflective Ray tracing anyway anyway like if you're talking about Shadows okay maybe but I I think the Harry Potter shot near the end of the the presentation was a little bit better representation of it but like you said it was a very strange decision to talk about pssr the PlayStation spectral super resolution with a uh visual demonstration of what it will do without somebody like Mark cery diving into how it actually works what it's actually doing in the background and a in a more meaningful way if you had the opportunity what would you have changed about how you presented these tiny details that showcase the power of the PlayStation 5 Pro I think you need uh better uh examples I think the Grand Turismo one was pretty good because you actually saw an effect that had previously only been seen in the replays and photo mode and stuff and it was actually there in gamepl so that was pretty cool but you know I would have liked to have seen the stuff that we do obviously uh which would be like you know you see gameplay you have uh freeze frames you have zooms you have actual explanation of what's going on there you have a comparison against the standard experience which they kind of shied away from there because I think they can't show that the standard machine which the vast majority of people are going to buy it can't be seen to be that deficient so yeah that's that's kind of the way I'd have done things um Hogwarts was a bit weird I mean that's Unreal Engine 4 rate racing this is like the first iteration of epic's RT implementations there so it's it's not great compared to ue5 I would have gone for a ue5 game if they could have found one assuming there there is one I'm sure there are so yeah I guess you know when they sort of started off with the Last of Us Part Two you know obviously that's a PS4 game that's not the game I would have chosen to debut U PlayStation 5 Pro and secondly the performance mode in The Last of Us Part Two it's 1440p but it it doesn't look that bad but you know pssr I mean dlss has been I would say the most transformative technology in the PC space since its debut the second iteration of it in 2020 and you know to say to um higher end Enthusiast console users we've made our own version of this check it out it's really good look at this comparison look at this Zoom that we've done up against the standard model this is like a gamechanging Improvement everything that dlss has done in the PC space I think could have been deployed on the uh on the pssr demos there but we didn't really see it I'd would like to have seen just some screenshots uh done some pngs out there get them out there get people looking at it to actually you know do their own comparisons um yeah I'm just sort of a bit baffled by all of it to be honest um yeah what can I say it's kind of weird yeah and it was also odd to make the decision to take the shot and then put it in a even smaller box where if you're watching on your phone or you're watching on a device that it's even harder to tell what they're trying to Showcase side by side absolutely yeah I mean we've got our analytics on YouTube that tell us the devices that people are actually watching the content on and you know basically the last time I looked which I think was about a year ago it was over 50% of people are watching on their phone and that's lers only going to be going up so the concept that you're having to like you know strain to to actually see what the difference is it could have been handled a lot better I think what was one thing that the PlayStation 5 Pro does that has you the most excited out of all the tech that was shown um absolutely pssr because um if we look at what the prime deficiencies are of the base PlayStation 5 experience at the moment in a lot of multiplatform titles for sure the Sony first party games they they've always been really well optimized for the hardware but you know Unreal Engine and um you know other games like Space Marine 2 that's a that's a good example we should talk about they're necessarily cramming in a huge amount of of detail but to accommodate that on the GPU they've got to lower the resolution and then they upscale it again using FSR 2 which isn't particularly good pssr is is potentially transformative because um I reckon even you know let's say it's as good as xcss from Intel or dlss from Nvidia we don't know for sure cuz we haven't seen it properly but um the point is that you can actually use resolutions that low and it will look fine on a 4K screen but with the additional GPU horsepower they'll be increasing the resolution as well so you know I'd imagine those 720p base resolution games on PS5 they'll be like 900 or possibly even 1080p but the transformative thing is the pssr upscaling pass and if it's as good as we hope it is it should be passing for Native 4K or very very close to it and you know what that means is that that's more GPU horsepower that can be diverted not to the amount of pixels that are being rendered but to the quality of those pixels which means also of course that you can have stuff like uh R tracing adding to the rigs and I'm also pretty sure I mean in the senior article they were talking about um 8K griso 7 uh which you know that won't be running at Native 8K it will be using pssr and that's you know I want to see those screenshots man you know I want to play the game our as I said in our DF direct last night our 8K capture cards are ready for this we want to see we want to see how they're doing it we want to see how good pssr is um with Ratchet and Clank and Horizon forbidden West we can actually put those head-to-head against the PC Technologies Xs and dlss we can see just how good the um the Technologies are so it's a bit disappointing this is going to sound incredibly arrogant it's a bit disappointing that we didn't get to see it and we have still haven't seen it based on the quality of the presentation because you know if the stars are aligned pssr is going to be gamechanging for the console space and obviously machine learning in general I mean the PS5 Pros machine learning silicons like 300 tops it's not insignificant in terms of the amount of compute power that's there and you know that could just be the beginning I mean if you look at what Nvidia have done with you know Ray reconstruction frame Generation all using that machine learning silicon there's no reason why that shouldn't be coming to console as well and you know pssr is just the beginning hopefully yeah I mean I I agree that technology is something I would have liked to learn more about but besides the one recreated demonstration of what it's going to do he didn't really dive into it and it's one of the coolest pieces of technology that PlayStation is currently outing for their platform it's like Ray tracing is nice and um what was the other feature that they talk about things like game boost are interesting but how does all that work behind the scenes right yeah game boost is really interesting uh we could be looking let's let's cross our fingers here we could actually be looking at a lock 60 FES per second in Elder Wing oh yeah which which would be a console first with even without any upgrades but there's other stuff which I'm finding quite interesting is that um uh when um PS4 games were kind of upgraded to run on PS5 the developers had to um move those existing games onto the new sdks in order to tap into the new PS5 uh features what's happening with PS5 Pro is that they've recognized that that was a weakness and um pssr is going to be able to be integrated into games that were created on prior sdks and that's pretty awesome because that means that it there's a a fast and simple path for developers to be able to access what I think is going to be the killer feature of PS5 Pro on the library of games that are already out there uh it's potentially quite exciting yeah that seems like an easy win for them this is something that Xbox has offered with some of their older games just for purchasing the Xbox series X and Playstation has now implemented some cool technology that they're referring to as game boost which unfortunately wasn't really displayed in the presentation so another well that's an interesting how how how do you how do you demonstrate game boost without showing that the experience is deficient on your standard console that's going to be selling millions of units right that's the that's the big quandry I mean if you go back to PS4 Pro it was really easy it was like 4K screens are coming and um here's the machine that we're making for that oh and by the way it's actually going to improve performance if you still got a 1080p screen there's no display upgrades to hang this piece of hardware on and it's like well you know isn't PlayStation 5 already a 4K machine and it's like well yes and and no but this one definitely so yeah it's it's a crazy marketing challenge there for sure were there any differences that actually did jump out to you when they were doing the side by sides because for me it was the artifacting and The Last of Us presentation in the the compression which was really unfortunate I was curious were there any positive benefits that you could actually gleam from what they did decide to show us um I think it was definitely the rate racing in Gran Turismo 7 because you know RT Reflections on all the cars that's that's pretty awesome and it's something that's definitely not there on the on the standard PlayStation 5 so that was the one thing that definitely stood out you could see that things were improved and and and better on Hogwarts Legacy but that was 30 frames per second which you know it isn't really tying into the kind of vision that they were presenting for the machine I've got to say I thought that you know going into this presentation it was like how are they going to int introduce this machine and I thought that was actually done pretty well it was like 75% of users want to use the performance modes but what if you can have the performance mode that actually hits 60 frames per second and also have Fidelity uh quality as well I think that was pretty good belly I thought that was pretty good but you know it all kind of went to pot with the um examples that we used afterwards yeah Cy did say 30fps is choppy so that was a little bit of a a dig at developers who choose to use that yeah going into it could you explain like what does 67% more compute units on the GPU 28% faster memory resulting in 50 up to 50 to 45 to 50% faster rendering for like what does all that mean can you like break that down like what benefit will the user actually be seeing from these statistics that they put in the presentation um yeah that kind of ties into if you're talking like for like uh without any game patches in theory we don't know this because we haven't tested it and they haven't actually provided detail um the boost mode there should in theory provide 45% of raw compute power to uh those existing games so games that are running with Dynamic resolutions scaling they should they should look clearer they should maybe even hit the upper bounds of the DRS range they should look clearer games that have a GPU related bottleneck uh that stops them hitting their target frame rate they should hit 60 frames per second assuming that is the target frame rate um that's kind of out the outof the-box improvements now um if you're talking about the new games obviously again it means that you can uh increase resolution but the actual multiplier as as it were from image quality is going to come from pssr and if you actually look at uh you know PS4 Pro compared to PS4 they actually doubled GPU compute there it was like you know uh forget 45% it was like doubling it was like 100% more they can't do that this time around um because of the cost of making a chip that large so what they have done is introduced machine learning which is which is the way forward I think it's it's more about effic icy than Brute Force efficiency plus some extra Brute Force if you like but yeah that's that's kind of that's kind of the way it's going to work boost mode should be pretty good I think if assuming we get the full power of the uh of the machine and then you know developers will be able to use that extra boot Force to maybe use you know more rate tracing effects or to increase resolutions and then increase them again so to speak with pssi all sort of comes together there yeah I do hope they allow more people to have hands on there's not a lot of people in this space who do analysis like you do and I would like to see like even if it's not digital Foundry just somebody that understands how to Showcase 120 frames per second which was a feature that they were touting or uh you know here's what pssr is actually doing because I I don't feel like their own presentation fulfilled that need or the or the CNet piece unfortunately right sorry I mean the point I was going to make is that um um pssr is such a big deal because um well let's put it this way Nvidia are now saying that on some games they're seeing dlss being used by um something like the high 80s to 90% of users are using dlss this is like a transformative technology that's been widely adopted that everyone wants because you know it's like minimal image quality degradation in exchange for a massive increase in performance this is awesome it's never been seen before on Console uh working successfully um we've you know we've got a poor substitute at the moment in the form of um FSR 2 so to bring that to consoles for the first time uh is pretty awesome also you remember like going back to the PS3 era they always used to do those incredible Tech demos you remember all of the ducks the ducks yes everyone remembers the Ducks right yeah you know I'm sure that they've got more technology in the offing um you know similar to the way Nvidia has moved on to frame generation and Ray reconstruction you know let's see some of those demos you know make us excited about this thing you know not just showing us the last of us again yeah yeah right uh with the with the Boost and the percentages that we're talking about do you have any idea what a comparable PC build would be to the PlayStation 5 Pro because to me that $700 price tag with you know a hundred other $100 worth of other components put you in the $800 range and at some point I have to imagine people are saying maybe I should just go to PC at this point because this is this is quite expensive yeah what do you imagine that would cost probably a fair bit more I mean you need to have uh the GPU that you're going to need I mean if you consider the holistic view of all of the different components the enhanced raid facing no AMD GPU has that at the moment uh the machine learning block no AMD GPU has that it's almost like essentially an n style feature set but made by AMD um and the closest equivalent GPU you'll be looking at would be the RTX 470 the 4060 is quite close to base PlayStation 5 factoring out machine learning and raate facing so you're looking at a 4070 I looked on um uh I think it was Amazon yesterday amazon.com and the cheapest one of those is $540 so beyond that you've got to get a CPU a motherboard memory power supply case 2 terab SSD so it is going to wrap you know the the costs are going to ramp up right uh then you have your mitigating factors which is that you aren't paying however many dollars per year for for the the Glorious honor of being able to play online and have Cloud saves uh so you've got a kind of you know maybe sort of amortize costs over the year to get a a proper idea of what the actual comparison is um I do think maybe though um we might be slightly missing the point because if you consider what the PS5 Pro is it's a machine that's designed I don't think it's for new owners right it's for people that have got a PlayStation 5 but they've got the disposable income to have a better PlayStation 5 and I think that these guys are going to have an existing uh library of PS4 and PS5 titles and to make the jump for out of the PlayStation ecosystem and into the PC ecosystem then you've got to leave those titles behind your entire library that you might have amassed over like 10 years you've got to leave that behind you've got to start from scratch um which I think is probably going to be a step too far so that's kind of my viewpoint on that it's kind of like quite an interesting thing to do the to kind of weigh up the costs of individual components and then Factor it up against this $700 price point which is actually much higher in Europe and certainly in Japan and there the PC argument probably becomes a bit more compelling however what if you're not in the PlayStation ecosystem because Microsoft is going to be facing exactly the same cost challenges as Sony in producing new hardware you know and all of your Xbox games are going to be on PC now what is the remaining factor that stops you from jumping across cost a PC and I think that remaining factor is the fact that you can't really have a PC attached to your living room display and have a seamless experience with a joyad you know you've kind of we know this from PC handhelds and actually Phil Spencer has kind of admitted that the weakest part of Windows on handhelds is Windows Windows is going to need to dramatically improve in order to to do that but you know valve have basically got there with steam deck right M and uh Microsoft are obviously going to do something very similar so it's only a matter of time before this choice between console and PC is actually going to become quite a lot more uh of a of a head scratcher but probably less so if you're in the Xbox ecosystem because you know you'll be able to play your games on whatever console you got and whatever PC you got Sony though they've got a different challenge but man this price for the PS5 Pro is is is crazy high it's nuts right yeah it it it is very high I I've had sort of a theory about where Microsoft could go with the console if they're able to solve the challenge of the the console user wanting to get in on PC games by allowing storefronts like epic gam store on the next console whatever that may be while also addressing the interface issues where you know people don't want to install new drivers and deal with all of that stuff on Console they just want to sit on the couch and turn it on if they can solve that and the new console is more open for the enthusiasts like you know myself or yourself who want to get their whole steam library or add all the storefronts onto one box I I think that would give Sony a run for their money but let's focus back in on the the PS5 Pro uh for a second do do you think it's too expensive 74% of users on IGN voted and they think it's it's way too expensive what are you thinking about the price is this going to end up limiting their sales what do you think I think it obviously will limit their sales um but there's always going to be a core who will pay whatever they can in order to get the best possible experience and I think that's what this machine is is is aimed at however with that said this is breaking historical precedence on on Console pricing yes you I mean I saw the stuff from Jeff Keeley about inflation adjusted prices and whatnot but that's not the way the consumer mentality works you know um and PS4 Pro by the way was like $399 I seem to recall um and now we're up to like what is it you know 699 MH uh there's guys in Europe who are paying almost double for a PS5 Pro than than they did for a PS4 Pro which is which is kind of crazy my theory on this and again I'm just reminded of something that Phil Spencer said which is that you know he's questioning whether subsidizing people to buy consoles is actually working because um it's the same people buying consoles gen over gen the amount of people console Gamers isn't increasing it's the same guys buying new hardware and um if you're not in if you're if your subsidies are not increasing the size of the overall audience why are you having subsidies um it's you know it's it's it's not great and I think what we're seeing with the PlayStation 5 Pro is possibly an experiment from Sony and saying well okay we'll continue to subsidize a bit the standard unit but the PS5 Pro we're going to see what happens if we just sell it at Cost or heaven forbid try to make some some actual money on it and so I think this is possibly why I mean going into this I suspected that it would be a $600 console and we'd get a hair cut and pricing on the standard model to to kind of widen it out a bit instead it looks like the standard model staying where it is and Sony has said that they're having problems with cost reduction it's going up and then yes yeah they raised the price sorry yeah and then we've got the um uh the issues with well where are we going to what we going to do with the PlayStation 5 Pro then it's got to be more expensive $200 though no no disc drive the no disc drive scenario I'm um I knew it was happening that's why I bought you can see in the background there I bought one of those disc drives cuz I knew this was going to happen and if it didn't happen I could just return it cynical but it worked anyway the point is um if you've got here's the weird thing if you're um marketing a pro console and it has less features than the standard console that's you know $200 cheaper that's that's shocking and let's consider the people that are going to be buying PS5 Pro it's going to be people that are deeply invested in the PlayStation ecosystem you know they bought the PlayStation 4 they probably bought the cor Pro they've got a lot of disc games right surely you know the transition to digital has gained momentum over the years but the concept that you know people who've got um physical media can't actually run them on their PS5 Pro unless they spend was it $80 or $100 in the US um it's £100 in the UK and 100 Euros in uh in Europe it's nuts yeah it's you know that's not great so it's kind of like a value hit there upon a value hit again where we were expecting $600 so yes I mean that's that's sort of kind of shocking I think that's what people are taking umage at and I think quite rightfully so thing is though consumer electronics are just getting more expensive to make and but we're now we you know obviously we're facing the question of well when NextGen comes along is that console going to be $700 surely not I didn't even think about that yeah like was it going to be $800 $900 for whatever the most powerful console ends up being down the line uh it's sort of a scary thought and those Enthusiast users might be thinking to themselves well why should I pay a premium for the console if I'm going to be paying a premium maybe I should get a PC because then I can upgrade at my own pace when I feel like I need an upgrade and I can spend as much or as little as I want mhm yeah Food For Thought who do do you think should upgrade to the PlayStation 5 Pro and who do you think should probably just wait obviously people who don't want to spend the money but but like who do you think is is the target for this upgrade like who would you recommend it to as a friend it's basically going to be those guys who've got the money to spare who want the best of the best now the question is this this is kind of at odds with the concept of what a console is which is a mainstream proposition you know a games machine for the every man this is isn't that that's what the bass PlayStation 5 is for and uh I think if I was recommending to a friend I'd tell them to go to Facebook Marketplace and get one for like $350 or whatever you know I got an Xbox series s from Facebook Marketplace for 65 wow yeah nice nicely done so that's my recommendation there but you know the people who should buy it you know the people who could afford it I think primarily as you as you said and secondly the people that you know maybe theyve got their 77 85 in oleds and they actually want to have the best possible experience I think that's for them any final thoughts on the PlayStation 5 Pro reveal um yes I think um well I've already laid out the criticisms I've got a criticism about the hardware which is that they literally said the CPU is the same um and at the same time they're talking about you know wanting to have 60 frames per second experiences all of the enhancements in the Pro are geared towards GPU so if your GPU if Graphics are the limit then you know obviously the pro is going to be a champion there however you know recently I think the last game we looked at I mentioned it earlier Space Marine 2 um performance mode on that on PlayStation 5 doesn't get near 60 frames per second and it won't with PlayStation 5 Pro the graphics will look prettier but you still won't be at 60 frames per second because it's not just about what you're rendering it's about what you're Sim ating and you know all of the hordes that are sort of in that game the Swarms it's just too much for the for the CPU seemingly now what they didn't say is that there is uh an option for developers to increase the clock speeds by 10% um but 10% of something that's low is is still low 10% plus still low so that's not going to help and uh your colleague Alex said to me this morning well you know what about GTA 6 is this going to run at 60 FES per second second that's a simulation heavy game historically and I would say probably not there which is probably going to upset a lot of people but you know every single GTA game has been 30 FPS sometimes struggling to hit 30 FPS if they're pushing simulation just as hard in in GTA 6 I'm not seeing anything in the PlayStation 5 Pro that's going to get you to 60 FPS if the base machine can't do it if it can happy days but if it can't unhappy days yeah that does make me wonder will GTA 6 move the needle for the pro as much as I've thought it will because if it's not going to be that drastic of an increase in terms of performance and in terms of fidelity I do wonder if people decide to make the jump because that game will sell Hardware period it is going to be uh the biggest Cash Cow for any console manufacturer that is able to support the title yeah I mean they could have like you know vastly improved image quality possibly you know extra draw draw distances better raid facing I think they're using raid faced GI in GTA 6 based on the trailer that we saw MH um so possibly they can you know they can ramp up the visuals but it's very PlayStation 4 Pro likee in that regard where it was all about boosting the visuals um and the CPU less so so you were kind of limited in what you could do in actual fact the PS4 Pro had more of a CPU boost than the 5 Pro does it was like 30% extra performance on the CPU this time around it's an optional 10% uh which is um obviously less impactful a lot to think about thank you so much for joining us today Richard of course people can find you on digital Foundry you did a great 1-hour breakdown with you know your team and that was a lot of fun to watch so be sure to check that out and of course here on IG be sure to keep with us for all things gaming and we'll see you for the next fun