PlayStation 5 Pro's new PSSR to radically improve image quality: has 1.2GB more RAM for games

We heard about Sony's new PlayStation Spatial Super Resolution (PSSR) technology from new leaks last week, but now the folks at Digital Foundry have torn through the rumors and provided some more information on the PlayStation 5 Pro console and its beefed-up hardware capabilities.

PSSR will reportedly be capable of being backported to any existing PlayStation game, which will make for some even better-looking PS5 games on the faster PS5 Pro console. Digital Foundry explains that Sony says PSSR has a 250MB memory footprint, but developer disclosures show that PSSR can be backported to ANY game... now we're talking.

Digital Foundry explained: "This is at odds with 'back compat plus' features bolted on to PS4 games running on PS5, which required games to run on modern development environments (SDKs). This could be of crucial importance in upgrading existing PS5 games that suffer from image quality problems - and we're seeing a lot of those thanks to low internal resolutions and FSR2 upscaling. The Pro could deliver vastly improved results via its extra GPU power and PSSR upscaling".

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Sony's beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console has 1.2GB more memory than the PlayStation 5 -- 13.7GB in the PS5 Pro compared to 12.5GB in the PS5 -- which will help the PS5 Pro stand out and stronger than the PS5. Developers can tap into this additional RAM, sprinkling PSSR on top and spitting out improved visuals and hopefully frame rates, in existing PlayStation games.

The Digital Foundry article explained: "Bearing in mind that the standard PS5 already has enough memory to service a 4K display, you might wonder why this 1.2GB is necessary. Sony cites the use of PSSR with its 250MB footprint as one use-case, while also pointing out that ray tracing features (particularly the BVH structures used to calculate ray bounces) are also memory-intensive. Developers can use the memory as they please, but if they max out the 12.5GB on the standard model without RT features, there's now memory available to tap into more of the Pro's capabilities".

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