New rumors are circulating around the PS5 Pro that the heavily speculated console could be reliant on AI upscaling technology in order to run its games at higher framerates than the base system.
Discussed on prominent hardware leaker channel Moore’s Law is Dead during the Broken Silicon 246 podcast, it’s been alleged that the PS5 Pro could force a version of FSR or DLSS AI-powered upscaling technology in order to achieve higher framerates then when played natively. This means that by default, the console could dynamically scale resolutions of PS5 games even in titles that haven’t received any kind of compatible patch.
The example was brought up with how the Xbox Series X currently handles backwards compatibility of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games where the resolutions can dynamically scale “without a patch from the developers”. It’s been stated that Sony is also able to force games to run in 1440p from the console’s main menu, so we could see the PS5 Pro relying less on its raw native hardware prowess, and more so on a kind of NPU (neural processing unit) to aid in FSR / DLSS-style upscaling instead.
It’s possible that this could be as simple as an “experimental toggle” from a dedicated game’s settings menu or something that you could manually tick and keep enabled from the system’s settings, just as you can set resolution right now. This would mean being able to target more games in 4K120 as while the base PS5 can technically do so, the supported list isn’t too expansive, as there are just 99 games that can hit this target (via Push Square), and many are cross-generation or indie releases.
The future of the PS5’s optimization could be through upscaling
The PS5 is currently equipped with AMD FSR 2 for certain games such as Cyberpunk 2077 to push a higher visual fidelity than native rendering. On PC, this functionality is nothing new. Gamers have gotten used to playing games with the likes of Nvidia DLSS 3’s Frame Generation and FSR 3 enabled to aid what the silicon can actually do. We’ve seen this from the best graphics cards with framerates shooting through the roof when switched on, but native numbers leaving a lot to be desired.
As discussed by MLID, the PS5 Pro’s greatest strength could be in its adoption of AI upscaling tech which would keep it competitive with current GPU hardware for longer. It seems incredibly unlikely that Sony would implement a new GPU just for the console, so RDNA 3 graphics seem off the table, however, that wouldn’t strictly be necessarily if the console had a way to force FSR in games through a dedicated neural chip baked onto the motherboard.
