PlayStation 5 Pro Ray Tracing Capabilities May Not Be Very Transformative; PSSR Has the Potential of Being a Huge Game Changer

The PlayStation 5 Pro comes with improved ray tracing capabilities over the base model, but they may not be very transformative. The PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaler, on the other hand, could be a huge game changer.

The tech experts at Digital Foundry recently commented on the three pillars of the PlayStation 5 Pro in a new video, highlighting how the system’s ray tracing capabilities may not be as transformative as, for example, those introduced by NVIDIA’s Turing architecture which powered the RTX 2000 series GPUs. For starters, the technical presentation hosted by Mark Cerny was very vague on the matter and focused on games that already have some sort of ray tracing support, such as Hogwarts Legacy and Gran Turismo 7.

Earlier leaks also indicate smaller additions, and that seems to be what was shown during the technical showcase, although, in Gran Turismo 7’s case, the addition of ray tracing during races could be a great showcase of the system’s capabilities, as the ray-traced reflections the game already supports are very high-end. Hogwarts Legacy, on the other hand, wasn’t a particularly great showcase, as the ray-traced reflections looked grainy, suggesting their low resolution even on PlayStation 5 Pro. The game also ran at 30 frames per second, which is definitely not good, although understandable, given it is an open-world game.

What could be truly game-changing of the three PlayStation 5 Pro pillars is the AI-powered PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaler, especially for 4K displays, as similar upscalers like NVIDIA DLSS don’t need a very high base resolution to upscale the image to higher resolutions with good image quality. The upscaler could also free some GPU time to allow it to do other things, including better ray tracing. Unfortunately, even PSSR wasn’t showcased properly during the technical presentation, according to Digital Foundry, as Sony focused on its first-party titles, which generally sport great image quality even in Performance Mode on the base model. The real test will be with third-party titles, whose image quality is generally not great often due to AMD FSR 2 and Unreal Engine 5 games, which are upscaled from very low resolutions.

Even so, the PlayStation 5 Pro AI-driven upscaler already looks transformative. The upscaler can be retrofitted into existing games without having to upgrade SDK, and it likely requires the same inputs used for implementing AMD FSR 2, so most games should be able to benefit from it with minimal input from developers. With the increased GPU power allowing for games using dynamic resolution scaling to have a better range, which a leaked benchmark also confirmed, the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaler could be the system’s best feature.

Whether these improvements will entice players owning the base model to upgrade to the PlayStation 5 Pro remains to be seen, considering its steep price. According to analysts, the console should sell as well as the PlayStation 4 Pro did despite its $699.99, €799.99 price