DF Weekly: PlayStation Project Q and PS5 Pro leaks raise more questions than answers
Compelling rumours tell us little about the final user experience.
It's basically a clean sweep for Sony and PlayStation news, leaks and rumours in this week's DF Direct Weekly news stories. That kicks off by picking up a thread from last week about the 'Project Trinity' PS5 Pro leak that emerged, before moving onto the remarkable - and very real - price cuts we saw on the existing PlayStation 5 model. Meanwhile, compelling footage and photos of the Project Q handheld emerged, raising more questions than answers about the nature of the hardware.
I talked a little last week about the PS5 Pro specification as outed by journalist Tom Henderson. He's previously established trust in his sources by correctly predicting the Project Q handheld, but the jury's still out on his reports on the new PlayStation 5 model with a detachable/optional BD drive. The specs he offers for Trinity amount to 30 WGPs, 18000 MT/s memory, an '8K performance mode' and 'accelerated ray tracing'. The chip at the heart of the machine is codenamed Viola, a state of affairs corroborated by Kepler, who seems to have know about this - and other - AMD processors since at least March or April.
In the Direct, we talk about what a PS5 Pro could actually deliver that's worthwhile to the audience, having previously not seen the point in the machine. The leaked spec does suggest that a PS4 Pro-like device is viable: not quite the doubling of compute units we saw in the Pro, but there's the potential for much higher clock speeds to still deliver a notional 2x boost to performance. The faster memory would be in line with the kind of bandwidth increases we saw in the Pro, but really, it's what we don't know that is arguably more important.
- 00:00:00 Introduction
- 00:00:50 News 01: PS5 Pro detailed in new rumours
- 00:29:08 News 02: Big PS5 summer discounts: what could they mean?
- 00:37:48 News 03: Project Q handheld potentially leaked
- 00:46:09 News 04: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart vs PS4 HDD
- 00:59:13 Supporter Q1: Why don't developers include an uncapped mode in games, for the benefit of more powerful future consoles?
- 01:03:58 Supporter Q2: Are teraflop figures for GPU hardware pointless nowadays?
- 01:08:53 Supporter Q3: Could Rich be given the high-end PC version in system comparison videos for once?
- 01:10:49 Supporter Q4: Oliver operates in a totally different timezone to everyone else at DF. Is this ever helpful?
- 01:12:26 Supporter Q5: What are the benefits of playing on original hardware if the console can be emulated very effectively?
Firstly, there's the question of backwards compatibilty. Sony achieved this on PS5 and PS4 Pro by delivering hardware symmetry with prior systems. PS4 Pro literally doubled/mirrored the existing GPU and could effectively disable the second half of it to maintain compatibility with the older system. PS5 had the same compute unit count as PS4 Pro and relied on hardware back-compat to get the job done. Achieving the same on PS5 with 60 compute units may suggest a different strategy on Sony's part this time. A 60 CU part with hardware symmetry along the lines of the PS4 Pro would require an 80 CU GPU, which would be a tremendous amount of wastage.
The concept of 'accelerated ray tracing' may simply be achieved via clock speed boosts, or it may be the case that current/future AMD tech could be brought into play. It's also conceivable that Mark Cerny and his team may have their own custom RT designs. An '8K performance mode' again seems to suggest custom hardware - but quite why 8K receives such a focus when a 4K performance mode makes more sense is a touch baffling. At this point, the concept of the Pro console seems viable, but I suspect that like PS4 Pro before it, it's going to require an official reveal from Sony and some compelling demos to make the concept seem worthwhile. And in fairness, if there's a sense of being underwhelmed here, we had exactly the same reaction to the first PS4 Pro leaks.
And speaking of leaks, the Sony Project Q handheld also seems to have emerged in new media from unofficial sources - and not looking particularly impressive. Assuming the leak is genuine and not some kind of elaborate fake, the evidence suggests an Android tablet mounted within a DualSense-like shell. A Qualcomm chipset also appears to be at the heart of the device, leading to hopes that we could see some decent emulation potential on the device. The leak is highly unflattering some even somewhat damaging - depending on the price-point - but again, I still feel the value will all be in the execution. If we can get a compelling, low latency streaming experience from the PS5 with good image quality (a modern day Wii U gamepad, if you will), I suspect it will find an audience - whether it's built on Android or not. However, a basic remote play receiver just won't cut the mustard.
So, along with massive PS5 discounts seen in the UK last week, there's lots of get through in this week's Direct - but Supporter Q+A continues to deliver. Should all console games have unlocked frame-rate supports? Do teraflops mean anything anymore in a world where PS5 only has circa 2TF more than the Asus ROG Ally? And what are the benefits of retro gaming on original hardware vs the best emulators? There's lots going on in the Supporter Program, including our continued behind the scenes work on 8K 60fps and full 4K 120fps capture, along with bonus materials, early access and our amazing community (who helped make this possible, by the way) so please do consider joining us!
