A new week and a fresh Monday brings with it the hopefully welcome prospect of a new episode of DF Direct Weekly – and this week, the team sit down to discuss topics as diverse as Starfield’s planned performance upgrade for Xbox Series X, the latest Switch 2 rumours, more path tracing in Capcom RE Engine titles and some new information on the PlayStation 5 Pro’s GPU – such as a max clock speed of 2.35GHz.
It’s the PS5 Pro graphics details I’m going to concentrate on today because the information casts an interesting new light on the upcoming console – and may deliver clarity on some of the question marks surrounding GPU performance and backwards compatibility with the existing PS5. Leaked specifications, derived from Sony’s developer portal, suggest that the PS5 Pro has 30 WGP (Work Group Processors) delivering 33.5 teraflops of performance. This is up against the standard model with 18 WGP offering up an equivalent 10.23 teraflops.
On the surface level, that’s an extra 227 percent of performance, except that the same Sony documents suggest only an extra 45 percent of actual game throughput. Part of the explanation comes from the RDNA 3 architecture with its dual-issue FP32 support, which doubles the amount of instructions processed, but which does not typically double game performance.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:41 News 01: Bethesda announces big Starfield update0:23:05 News 02: AMD sees massive gaming revenue decline0:40:14 News 03: New PS5 Pro GPU details!0:58:27 News 04: Switch 2 rumour roundup1:07:40 News 05: RTX Remix getting DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction1:16:02 News 06: Resident Evil titles get path tracing!1:27:14 News 07: AMD Strix APUs pack great integrated GPU performance1:35:06 Supporter Q1: Could Nintendo games use DLSS 2 to reach 4K output on Switch 2?1:40:23 Supporter Q2: What features would you add to Switch 2, if you could pick anything?1:45:25 Supporter Q3: Could the potential merging of Xbox and PC development hurt Xbox?1:50:13 Supporter Q4: Could developers run a game’s logic at high rates to improve responsiveness, while keeping frame-rate untouched?1:54:19 Supporter Q5: Gaming handhelds theoretically seem as fast as a Series S. Why are they slower in practice?1:57:40 Supporter Q6: Could Valve build a viable console platform to compete with Sony?2:03:16 Supporter Q7: If you had to pick between #StutterStruggle and FSR 2 artifacts, which would you pick?
However, beyond that, there has been confusion about backwards compatibility support with the standard PS5. We know that the PS5 has 36 compute units (two CUs per WGP), running at a maximum of 2.23GHz. However, ‘reverse-engineering’ PS5 Pro’s 33.5TF figue suggests a 2.18GHz clock from its 60 CUs, than that of the standard model. Something doesn’t quite make sense then, with some suggesting that the new console actually has 56 CUs, with four disabled, which would deliver a higher clock to hit that 33.5TF – and perhaps in the process provide a hardware balance that’s a better fit for PS5 game compatibility.