HardwareGraphics CardsPlayStation 5 Pro hardware leak suggests its GPU is a RDNA 3/4-hybrid design, with some big improvements coming this wayWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
HardwareGraphics CardsPlayStation 5 Pro hardware leak suggests its GPU is a RDNA 3/4-hybrid design, with some big improvements coming this wayWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Sony)
Hot on the tails of the rumour thatSony is planning on releasing its own upscaling technology, with the forthcoming PlayStation 5 Pro, comes a wealth of tidbits purporting to be what the next-gen console’s hardware is going to be like. The CPU will still be the same ol' Zen 2 core, and the RAM’s a bit faster, but the GPU is getting replaced with a whole new design. And it’s seemingly a funky blend of RDNA 3 and RDNA 4.
The leaks in question come fromInside Gamingand while they are unsubstantiated claims, the details seem credible enough to me. For example, it’s being said that the PS5 Pro’s custom AMD APU retains the same Zen 2-powered CPU as in the originalPlayStation 5. So that’s still eight cores and 16 threads, but that’s fine for the majority of games.
To put those figures into perspective, theRadeon RX 6800andRX 7800 XTboth have 256-bit buses, but the former uses 16 Gbps GDDR6, whereas the latter has chips running at 19.5 Gbps for 624 GB/s of bandwidth. On paper, that would make the PS5 Pro look especially nice, as the RX 7800 XT is no slouch, but that GPU also packs 64 MB of Level 3 cache (akaInfinity Cache) to reduce the load on the VRAM.
Console APUs are too small to have lots of cache.(Image credit: Fritzchen Fritz / Flickr)
There’s no sign of the PS5 Pro’s APU getting Infinity Cache, because AMD and Sony need the chip to be as small as possible, in order to keep manufacturing costs down. But since the CPUandGPU are using the same pool of RAM, that 576 GB/s of bandwidth is going to be hit hard. Especially when you read about the claimed changes to the graphics processor.
In the original PS5, the GPU is almost like an RDNA 2 processor, with 36 Compute Units (CUs) paired into 18 Workgroup Processors (WGPs). Inside each CU are two banks of 32 ALUs, that handle all of the shaders. The rumours for the PS5 Pro claim that the new GPU sports 30 WGPs, the same as the RX 7800 XT, for a peak FP32 throughput of 33.5 TFLOPS.
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If both of those figures are correct, then the only way this could happen is if the CUs are based on theRDNA 3 architecture, which means they have two banks of 64 ALUs. A quick calculation on a bit of paper puts the boost clock at 2,180 MHz, which is lower than the PS5’s but the extra shaders more than make up for it.
However, we’re also being told theRay Acceleratorsin the CUs support BVH8 traversal shaders. BVHs, or bounding volume hierarchies, are data structures used to speed up working out which object a light ray is interacting with and in RDNA 3, the shaders work on four BVH children from each node (aka BVH4).
The PS5 Pro GPU will have similar Compute Units to RDNA 3 chips.(Image credit: AMD)
Increasing this to eight means, in theory, that the PS5 Pro GPU should be able to work through the traversal process a lot quicker than previously. Potentially, at least, as it’s not as simple as ‘the number is doubled and so is the performance’. While there’s no indication that AMD has shifted these operations off the CUs and onto dedicated hardware units (like Nvidia does with its GPUs), the change in the traversal shaders tells us that the new GPU isnota pure RDNA 3 one but instead an RDNA 3/4 hybrid.
It’s unlikely to be a total RDNA 4 design because of it not having any Infinity Cache, but if the figures are all to be believed, it’s more RDNA 4 than 3. The key sign for this is claim over the AI Accelerators, which first appeared in RDNA 3. In the PS5 Pro’s chip, they are purported to reach 300 TOPS in INT8 mode and 67 TFLOPS in FP16 mode.
The RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7800 XT, for example, can do 512 INT8/FP16 operations per CU per clock cycle, on its AI accelerators, which means peaks of 75 TOPS and 75 TFLOPS respectively. For comparison, the Tensor cores in Nvidia’sGeForce RTX 3090 Tihave a peak INT8 throughput of 320 TOPS.
What use would all that be for? AI, be it in the form of upscaling or any other task thatmachine learning can be applied to.
Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
Your next upgrade
(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
(Image credit: Future)
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.
At this stage, it’s allifsandbuts, and there’s no guarantee whatsoever that any of this is true. But machine learning and ray tracing performance have previously been RDNA’s Achilles' heel, so it makes a lot of sense that AMD would significantly improve them for RDNA 4, given how important machine learning workloads are these days.
I’m unlikely to go out and buy a PlayStation 5 Pro when it launches, given that there’s a perfectly decent PS5 already in use in my house and a multitude of gaming PCs, but from a tech writer’s perspective, it looks quite promising.
From a GPU enthusiast point of view, though, RDNA 4 is looking mightily interesting: It may not end upright at the top of the performance charts, but it looks like it will have all the features you could want.
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