PlayStation Chief Architect Mark CernyExplainThe architectural design of the PlayStation 5 Pro began in 2020. In addition to in-depth collaboration with AMD to customize the architecture, the company also collaborated with AMD on an artificial intelligence machine learning project called "Amethyst."
Mark Cerny's explanation also indirectly clarified market rumors that the GPU design used in the PlayStation 5 Pro is not the RDNA 2025 display architecture expected to be unveiled during the upcoming CES 4, but the RDNA 2.X, a customized design based on RDNA 2.
However, although it is based on the RDNA 2 display architecture design, the display architecture called RDNA 2.X still imports some RDNA 3 and some upcoming RDNA display architecture technologies. In addition, the number of WGPs (work group processors) inside the GPU has been increased from 5 groups in the previous PlayStation 18 to 30 groups, which improves the display performance from the original 10 TFLOPS to 16.7 TFLOPS, a 45% increase.
This means that a frame that takes 5 milliseconds to process on PlayStation 16 can be rendered and output in just 5 milliseconds on PlayStation 11 Pro. The extra time can be used to process more complex real-time ray tracing effects, and the game's execution efficiency will not be affected when the real-time ray tracing function is enabled.
In addition to improvements to the GPU architecture, Mark Cerny explained that the PlayStation 5 Pro is assisted by an independent NPU with 8-bit floating-point precision and a computing power of 300 TOPS. It also uses the BVH8 acceleration architecture design for real-time ray tracing operations, which can double the performance of the BVH5 acceleration architecture used in the PlayStation 4. It can also complete color encoding in a single execution process, making the execution process simpler.
In addition, the use of GDDR6 display memory increases the data transmission frequency from 488GB/s to 576GB/s, allowing games to use more memory cache space, thereby further improving data processing efficiency.
As for the artificial intelligence machine learning project called "Amethyst" in collaboration with AMD on PlayStation 5 Pro, it uses a lightweight convolutional neural network structure that is more suitable for gaming. It operates through an independent NPU, allowing PlayStation 5 Pro's PSSR AI super-resolution technology to more dynamically enhance the original lower-resolution images to a higher resolution, while making the picture display more stable through frame interpolation.
To allow more game developers to take advantage of the lightweight convolutional neural network structure developed in collaboration with AMD, Sony announced that this lightweight convolutional neural network structure will be available in an open-source format, attracting more game content to incorporate this design and enabling better visual content on the PlayStation 5 Pro.
