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The PlayStation 5 Pro hasn’t yet been confirmed by Sony, but that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from surfacing some interesting information about the would-be console, and the latest rumor suggests Sony may add AI upscaling to the hardware.
This is a feature that would need dedicated hardware to support it. Something that the currently available PlayStation 5 doesn’t have. The rumor stems from the recently leaked Insomniac Games file dump that happened in December of last year. Part of that leak contained information regarding Insomniac employees, not excluding personal information about them. But it also contained information about Insomniac’s upcoming Wolverine game alongside a few screenshots of the unfinished project.
The leak also apparently contained a slide that listed off a string of features that the game may offer or make use of. The slide was posted to the Insomniacleaks subreddit. It states that Wolverine will deliver 60 frames per second as a base frame rate with performance ray tracing. Additionally, the game will have functional real-time global illumination and functional dynamic weather and foliage.
PlayStation 5 Pro could offer AI upscaling powered by machine learning
All of the game’s potential features make for exciting contemplation. But the most interesting tech by far is the AI upscaling powered by machine learning. Since the PlayStation 5 doesn’t have hardware to support this kind of feature, it’s quite likely that this is something that would appear on the PlayStation 5 Pro. AI upscaling was also leaked as a potential feature late last year. This Wolverine feature slide would seem to support the theory that the PlayStation 5 Pro will indeed offer AI upscaling.
This doesn’t tell us much about what the feature would do for the console. But it’s possible it could work something like NVIDIA’s DLSS Frame Generation. DLSS Frame Generation boosts performance in PC games by using AI to generate more frames. The AI upscaling on the PlayStation 5 Pro could do something similar to help maintain a consistent 60 frames per second even while a game is in quality mode.
Of course, this is all speculation in terms of how it might work. And nothing is certain until Sony confirms the console and that this feature is a part of it.