The PlayStation 5 Pro has officially been revealed, and developers will be releasing new-and-improved modes for their games that will take advantage of all that new horsepower. But what will it mean, really?
At a recent PlayStation 5 Pro preview event, we spoke with the technical leads of some of PlayStation’s biggest games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2, and others, to discuss what improvements we can expect to see now that there’s a more powerful PlayStation 5 on the market.
There are three key features of the PS5 Pro as explained by lead architect Mark Cerny during the announcement presentation. The upgraded GPU will allow for 45% faster rendering for gameplay, advanced ray tracing will create better lighting effects, and the AI upscaler, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, will help further improve graphics.
All of which you’ll see in action in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 according to Mike Fitzgerald, Director of Core Technology at Insomniac Games.
“The first big improvement in the PlayStation 5 Pro is PSSR, which is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, that lets us improve our old upscaling mode. We can render at a lower resolution, bring it up to a full 4K and get tons of extra detail out of the picture,” Fitzgerald says. “The second big thing is there’s new ray-tracing hardware in the PS5 Pro. We have really nice ray-traced reflections all across Spider-Man 2 and getting to run those faster and do more ray-tracing is a big deal.”
“And the third big thing altogether is these combined to make a new Performance Pro mode as we’re calling it on the PS5 Pro. You get the image quality and visuals of Fidelity Mode at the framerate of Performance Mode.”
Top of mind for several technical leads, including the folks at Naughty Dog, was how on the base PS5, players would often have to choose between Fidelity Mode, which offered better resolution at lower framerates, typically 30 fps, or Performance Mode which raised the frame rate to 60 at the expense of better graphical textures and ray-tracing. That choice is no longer necessary on the PS5 Pro, which can run games combining better resolution with higher frame-rates.
“Well the number one thing is gonna be the ability to play at 60fps in 4K, so that has been a huge deal,” Travis McIntosh, Naughty Dog’s head of technology says. “It makes it so we don’t have to compromise, so you don’t have to pick between high fidelity and good performance.”
The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the games that will be enhanced on the PS5 Pro, with the option to play the game with better visuals while still running it in 60 fps through a new Pro Mode. But McIntosh says that both the Fidelity and Performance Modes will also be improved on the PS5 Pro.
“There’s more than that, there’s also the fact that the high fidelity mode on the base PS5 actually looks even better when you’re on Pro. And there are some minor performance issues in performance mode on the PS5 base model that are also much better. Very solid 60 [fps], a lot less frame drops when you get to the pro.”
But McIntosh also says he’s personally excited for PSSR, which uses AI to upscale graphics.
“I would say I’m just really excited about the ability to use AI upscaling. Going forward as a developer, as a tech geek we spend a lot of time worrying about pixel throughput. It’s actually really tough to hit the targets of getting this many pixels through the game, and now we can focus on cool graphics stuff that we’re doing as opposed to just increasing pixel count. So that’s been a big benefit.”
McIntosh goes in-depth on the PSSR technology and how it upscales 1440p resolution to 4K, telling IGN that it, “produces just a way better result than previous upscalers because it can be trained not only on our game but on lots and lots of other games, and it learns and it improves at each iteration can improve and fix graphical errors, fix artifacting, and it learns how to make things look good. Foliage for instance is one example in our game that looks really good after the upscaler because the neural network is trained to do foliage really well.”
For Guerrilla Games World Lighting lead Roderick van der Steen, the biggest changes to Horizon Forbidden West all have to do with resolution and how improved they’ll be on the PS5 Pro, from better lighting to textures on characters.
“A big improvement that we could make by using the PS5 Pro is we could increase the resolution, increase stability of the image which is something we really focused on for this patch. And various other aspects like better filtering, better shadowing, and better volumetrics.”
Van der Steen says these improvements will be seen particularly in complicated models. “So fire, holograms, but also the skin rendering and the hair rendering where we could increase the shadow filtering to give a much more smooth and stable image.”
Lastly, ray tracing has been around for a few years now, but has often been sacrificed on consoles for anyone who prefers performance mode, which according to PlayStation is a majority of players. But the PS5 Pro is now able to add better ray tracing while maintaining a higher framerate. Just ask Jose Villeta, technical director at Avalanche Software, the developers of Hogwarts Legacy.
“So one of the few things we were able to improve on in our game thanks to the PS5 Pro is we focused on three areas,” Villeta reveals. “First we integrated PSSR – that gives a better upscaled image technology. And second we focused on ray-tracing, we tried to enable not only the best ray-tracing capabilities but improve the ray-tracing we had before. We were able to bring ray-tracing shadows, we were able to increase the percentage of ray-tracing reflections so they look sharper and have more content and detail.”
The improvements are a result of the better GPU which Villeta credits for giving Hogwarts extra heft. “The extra power we can actually make sure that all our visual modes, we have Fidelity, Fidelity with ray-tracing, and Performance mode, are all running at better framerate.”
Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Hogwarts Legacy are just four of the many games confirmed for improvements on the PS5 Pro, and we can expect to see even more Pro-enhanced games as we get closer to the new console’s launch on November 7.
For more on the PS5 Pro, check out our full hands-on preview, as well our interview on what more you can expect from the PS5 Pro.
Matt Kim is IGN's Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
