PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny has offered an explanation on PlayStation’s focus on GPU power over CPU upgrades for Sony Interactive Entertainment’s mid-gen console, the PS5 Pro.
During an interview with Digital Foundry, PlayStation lead architect, Mark Cerny, and Insomniac Games’ director of core technology, Mike Fitzgerald, were asked about the PS5 Pro CPU staying roughly the same as the one in the base PS5, and why it wasn’t a focus for upgrades like the improved GPU, memory, and storage. Cerny responded by saying that it was essentially a question of where you put your resources.
The PlayStation lead architect explained that he wasn’t seeing nor did he think he would see many titles that couldn’t run at 60 fps with the base PS5’s CPU configuration. He referred to this as his litmus test of sorts. He clarified that he wasn’t trying to find out if all games run at 60 fps as opposed to whether they run at 120 fps. He pointed out that you can count the AAA exceptions on one hand for games that don’t run at 60 fps. As such, he said that it seemed that if pretty much all resources were thrown into the graphics, that would be the best approach.
Fitzgerald vouched for Cerny’s design choices with the PS5 Pro, saying that, as developers, him and his team at Insomniac Games are very happy with where the focus of the mid-gen console’s hardware is, implying that the studio preferred having an improved GPU over a CPU upgrade.
On his vision for what developers will be achieving on the PS5 Pro ultimately in the future, Cerny said that he’s already happy with the launch lineup. He said that the hardware team is just making tools for the developers, and how the developers use them is ultimately up to them. He expects that, three or five years down the road, there will be a lot more different ways to use the tools that he hadn’t anticipated.
