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.

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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