In-Depth Look at PlayStation 5 Pro Specs: Mark Cerny Debunks ‘FLOPflation’ Claims

Yesterday, PlayStation released a video featuring Mark Cerny at Sony Interactive Entertainment headquarters, where he led a technical seminar on the PS5 Pro. As the system architect, Cerny took this opportunity to delve into the hardware capabilities of the PlayStation 5 Pro and clear up some circulating rumors about this highly anticipated console. He spent some time addressing the buzz around “FLOPflation,” a term stemming from an incorrect 33.5 TFLOPs figure that a leaker had put out. This misinformation arose from a misunderstanding regarding the RDNA 3-inspired architecture.

In actuality, the PS5 Pro delivers 16.7 TFLOPs, up from the PS5’s 10 TFLOPs. Interestingly, some accurate leaks before the release suggested the PS5 Pro hitting 300 TOPS for 8-bit calculations, while 16-bit calculations reach up to 67 TFLOPS. Cerny pointed out that although the architecture is RDNA 2.X, it integrates some RDNA 3 features. This careful customization by Sony ensures that developers do not need to completely rewrite code for the new system.

Mark Cerny also highlighted what are considered the PS5 Pro’s most significant advancements: its revamped Ray Acceleration structure that utilizes BVH8 (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) and enhanced hardware stack management. This improvement means that graphics shader code now operates more efficiently and smoothly on the new console.

Bounding Volume Hierarchy, or BVH, relates to how bounding boxes are used in 3D rendering for compute-intensive tasks like reflections. The PS5 used BVH4—groups of 4 bounding boxes—for ray tracing calculations. The PS5 Pro advances this with BVH8, using 8 bounding boxes. The Ray Intersection Engine has also been improved from analyzing 4 boxes and 1 triangle on the PS5 to 8 boxes and 2 triangles on the PS5 Pro.

These advancements in ray tracing hardware on the PlayStation 5 Pro come thanks to the highly customized RDNA 2 GPU architecture from the PS5. These updates result in excellent performance boosts for curved and textured light reflections, although improvements for shadows and flat surfaces are a bit more modest.

For those keen on even more detailed information, the full 37-minute video dives deeper into the technicalities, offering a look at the competitive landscape of the console market and the technologies driving it.