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https://youtube.com/watch?v=MApTG1wapJA&si=6CIbRLjbfUwV29IT
Great video showing the difference of the two
The side-by-sides are definitely diminished returns compared to earlier gens where hardware bumps had very noticeable gains.
I am sure the performance is measurably better than the base PS5, but I don't think it's $200-plus-separate-disc-drive better.
I also found the game choices they used for some of these comparisons to be odd picks. Sure you have "Made for PS5" exclusives like the new Ratchet and Clank, Returnal, and Spider-Man 2, but they also heavily showcased:
The Last of Us Part 2
God of War: Ragnarok
Ghost of Tsushima
Horizon: Forbidden West
Control
All of those are last-gen games that received PS5 enhancements. Being on a base PS5, I already feel like I am getting the "better" experience compared to the default for those games, so why upgrade?
What do I do with my PS5 discs if I buy the Pro one day? Are they just unusable? Will I be able to get a digital copy for free since I already paid them for the disc they stopped supporting?
It seems like there's no sane migration path from PS5 with disc drive to the PS5 Pro.
There's an external drive accessory you can buy from them for about $80.
Oh, ok then. Guess who didn't read the article. :-)
It's a pity SONY didn't have any games to announce alongside the new console. There is nothing or there I feel like I need more power to play, and I already completed games they demoed, sometimes years ago.
SEVEN HUNDRED US DOLLARS!
Sony costumers need to remind them of the PS3.
Why not go PC at this point. Modern consoles are locked pre-built PCs and paying $700 for a locked system is crazy.
I don't know if It turns out that I was stupid for not buying the original PS5 or holding out for a Pro one even from back then.
I was looking forward to this a lot because I could get the better version from day 1 and have a lot of games to play from taking and borrowing my brother's disc games.
I guess I'll get the XBSX for GTA VI when it comes.
Not like holding out matters now, they just raised the price in Japan for the 3rd time, second wind said the controller got 5 dollars more expensive, you can only save with used nowadays.
This GPU bump is pretty big it's almost a PS6. Keeping the old Zen2 CPU is disappointing though.
I'm still waiting for a reason to get a PS5 at all, everything I've been interested still got released on PS4 too - except for one single game.
I really don't care for better specs anymore, I probably couldn't even tell PS4 and PS5 games apart without a side-by-side comparison. Not to mention, to see a difference at all I'd need a new TV on top of the console. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
Consoles are a dying breed, especially Xbox and Playstation. Almost every exclusive ends up on PC anyway now, even then I personally don't think there's any game worth spending this much on hardware to play. There's literally no point in buying an Xbox or Playstation unless you really really don't want to bother with a PC setup.
I bet the market will end up as just PC and mobile. I mean the PC market share has already overtaken consoles.
Yeah nah
We will see when Playstation 6 releases, its unlikely to sell as much as PS5 did, let alone PS4. Microsoft already realised the decline and are jumping into games as a service for the Xbox brand, ideally they would want you to just stream their games, as shitty as that is. With Xbox gone, there's no competition and with Sony being Sony, they are going to abuse that to squeeze any extra money they can from people still willing.
PC became a lot more affordable and accessible in the last decade and it doesn't lock you into a closed ecosystem, you can upgrade when you want, you don't have to pay subscriptions to play online games.
Kids are more exposed to PC gaming than ever before, with all the popular 'content creators' primarily playing on PC, so they are naturally swayed to it more than consoles.
I hear so many stories of people switching to PC, friends asking me for advice for what to buy for themselves or their children.
Circana's May 2024 U.S. video game market highlights, the analytics company reported that video game hardware spending is down 40% compared to 2023. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have all shown "double-digit percentage declines," with the Nintendo Switch seeing the "most significant drop."
The writing is on the wall, it would take a big change to swing back the other way. There's a reason they are dying for GTA 6 to release.
One major improvement with the PS5 is the instant loading times. I don't think this thing will be any faster in that regard but it's a major improvement over the PS4. The other improvement over my original PS4 is that it doesn't sound like a jet engine after 20 minutes of running.
Ray tracing is cool but what console games are even using it at this point? It's like them advertising "8K capable" as if anyone gives a shit about that during a time that 4k is just barely becoming the standard for most.
The price increase is insane. That does not seem to scale in comparison with what you'll get in return over a regular PS5, especially if you're gonna be forced to buy the digital editions from the PS store, which are outside of the sales often the most expensively priced versions too, I've practically only bought second-hand discs for my PS5 because of that.
So either games will start running at higher framerates on real 4K, like 60FPS and up. Or developers will get lazy and stop bothering to optimise for the older generation of PS5, which will then be an excuse to upgrade to the more expensive edition to play at 4K and/or 60FPS.
I really hope the latter won't be a thing for the sake of both players and game development, there's been enough unoptimised shit lately and I hope we can move forward again.
That optimization part is what worries me. I still remember games like Control & Cyberpunk being basically unplayable unless you had a PS4 Pro.
Yep, people have rose tinted glasses but GTA V had a massive pop in issue on the consoles it released, the proper version was the PS4 one. Or PC.
Yeah I'm afraid that stuff like GTA6 might run like absolute dogshit on the old PS5, because they will see the opportunity to make use of the better hardware to sell the 4K and 60FPS. No doubt even Sony will try to push this, trying to sell more of these Pros.
I do hope we will move forward, but I think money and greed will play too much of a role in this. We don't even really need a PS5 Pro right now, looking at the current line-up of games that run fine on the old PS5, even in 4K and 60FPS, as long as developers spend the time to optimise their games instead of throwing everything on to raytracing (which I find is still in a very experimental phase).
I'm sure at some point devs will make good use of the extra power. And by that point this puppy will be half the cost MSRP to snatch up.
Not worth it. The PS5 games catalogue is piss poor compared to when the PS4 Pro released.
Frankly that's just thinking with only PS5 exclusives in mind.
A lot of people, probably the vast majority, don't get an Xbox or PlayStation for the exclusives. They just get one because they don't own or want a gaming PC and look for the easier more accessible solution.
So to them the catalogue is just fine because they don't get the console just for the exclusives.
Not sure what the point of downvoting me is, but I'd rather be interested to hear people's counter-arguments instead. Because a lot of people seem to just assume that many console-owners have both a console and gaming PC.
I dunno I haven't really been excited for any of the games released over the last couple years. It seems like nothing but legacy games like COD/Battlefield/Destiny and a few gems like Elden Ring. Most of these big studios seem to be laying off employees or shutting down instead of releasing new games. Part of this is just me being burnt out on gaming, but with so many studios struggling, it seems like it's more than just me feeling like this.
If what you said was true, Xbox would be in a much better position though, COD and EAFC are there too after all.
Kinda hard to make a solid catalogue when you follow the live service trend and your projects flop one after another.
gta 6 gets delayed... sony releases this early to sell more ps6's ?
Is there an eli5 on how "ai upscaling" is less (or even equally) technologically demanding than just putting in better hardware?
It started as good tech to make GPUs last longer, but now is a crutch that even top notch hardware like a 4090 needs to actually achieve playable performance with ray tracing at high resolutions. And that hardware is already way overpriced, imagine the price of something that could do it natively.
Huh, I wasn't aware that 4090s use similar tech. That sheds light on a few things. Thanks!
The game is rendered at a lower resolution, this saves a lot of resources. This isn't a linear thing, lowering the resolution reduces the performance needed by a lot more than you would think. Not just in processing power but also bandwidth and memory requirements. Then dedicated AI cores or even special AI scaler chips get used to upscale the image back to the requested resolution. This is a fixed cost and can be done with little power since the components are designed to do this task.
My TV for example has an AI scaler chip which is pretty nice (especially after tuning) for showing old content on a large high res screen. For games applying AI up scaling to old textures also does wonders.
Now even though this gets the AI label slapped on, this is nothing like the LMMs such as chat GPT. These are expert systems trained and designed to do exactly one thing. This is the good kind of AI that's actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs. Now these systems have their limitations, but for games the trade off between details and framerate can be worth it. Especially if our bad eyes and mediocre screens wouldn't really show the difference anyways.
The game is rendered at a lower resolution, this saves a lot of resources.
Then dedicated AI cores or even special AI scaler chips get used to upscale the image back to the requested resolution.
I get that much. Or at least, I get that's the intention.
This is a fixed cost and can be done with little power since the components are designed to do this task.
This us the part I struggle to believe/understand. I'm roughly aware of how resource intensive upscaling is on locally hosted models. The necessary tech/resources to do that to 4k+ in real time (120+ fps) seems at least equivalent, if not more expensive, to just rendering it that way in the first place. Are these "scaler chips" really that much more advanced/efficient?
Further questions aside, I appreciate the explanation. Thanks!
Rendering a 3D scene is much more intensive and complicated than a simple scaler. The scaler isn't advanced at all, it's actually very simple. And it can't be compared with running a large model locally. These are expert systems, not large models. They are very good at one thing and can do only that thing.
Like I said the cost is fixed, so if the scaler can handle 1080p at 120fps to upscale to 2K, then it can always handle that. It doesn't matter how complex or simple the image is, it will always use the same amount of power. It reads the image, does the calculation and outputs the resulting image.
Rendering a 3D scene is much much more complex and power intensive. The amount of power highly depends on the complexity of the scene and there is a lot more involved. It needs the gpu, cpu, memory and even sometimes storage, plus all the bandwidth and latency in between.
Upscaling isn't like that, it's a lot more simple. So if the hardware is there, like the AI cores on a gpu or the dedicated upscaler chip, it will always work. And since that hardware will normally not be heavily used, the rest of the components are still available for the game. A dedicated scaler is the most efficient, but the cores on the gpu aren't bad either. That's why something like DLSS doesn't just work on any hardware, it needs specialized components. And different generations and parts have different limitations.
Say your system can render a game at 1080p at a good solid 120fps. But you have a 2K monitor, so you want the game to run at 2K. This requires a lot more from the system, so the computer struggles to run the game at 60 fps and has annoying dips in demanding parts. With upscaling you run the game at 1080p at 120fps and the upscaler takes that image stream and converts it into 2K at a smooth 120fps. Now the scaler may not get all the details right, like running native 2K and it may make some small mistakes. But our eyes are pretty bad and if we're playing games our brains aren't looking for those details, but are instead focused on gameplay. So the output is probably pretty good and unless you were to compare it with 2K native side by side, probably you won't even notice the difference. So it's a way of having that excellent performance, without shelling out a 1000 bucks for better hardware.
There are limitations of course. Not all games conform to what the scaler is good at. It usually does well with realistic scenes, but can struggle with more abstract stuff. It can get annoying halos and weird artifacts. There are also limitations to what bandwidth it can push, so for example not all gpus can do 4K at a high framerate. If the game uses the AI cores as well for other stuff, that can become an issue. If the difference in resolution is too much, that becomes very noticeable and unplayable. Often there's also the option to use previous frames to generate intermediate frames, to boost the framerate with little cost. In my experience this doesn't work well and just makes the game feel like it's ghosting and smearing.
But when used properly, it can give a nice boost basically for free. I have even seen it used where the game could be run at a lower quality at the native resolution and high framerate, but looked better at a lower resolution with a higher quality setting and then upscaled. The extra effects outweighed the small loss of fidelity.
That is interesting. Thanks for the extra info!
This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs
lol, trying to hedge against downvotes from the anti-AI crowd?