PS4 Pro Only Uses Half of its GPU for Normal PS4 Games

PS4 Pro is a Beastly Console

Like it or not the console wars are alive and well with both Microsoft and Sony launching updated versions of their consoles in the near future. While Microsoft is claiming that their Xbox One Scorpio will be the only console capable of ‘true 4k’ and ‘hi-fidelity VR’ it’s still a long time coming before we actually see it. Coming this Nov 10 we’ll be able to see what the PS4 Pro is all about and while Sony has been tight-lipped on a lot of the specs until recently it’s important to not that the Pro looks to be one hell of a console in its own right.

PlayStation vr

While promises have indeed been made that we’re on the verge of affordable 4K gaming it’s very likely we’re looking at more upscaled 4K than native 4K. The fact is that if the PS4 Pro is to do native 4K it’s going to need to look pretty beefy under the hood. Mark Cerny, the Chief Architect over at PlayStation has finally made comments on exactly how powerful the PS4 Pro truly is. New architecture is being introduced with AMD’s Polaris GPU and an extra 1GB of slower DRAM is being added as well.

These tweaks will allow older PS4 games to run with a mere half the GPU of the PS4 Pro and the multitasking ability will use the extra 1GB of RAM to keep halted applications running all while the extra memory left from the initial 8GB is used to output that delicious 4K resolution for games. It has been confirmed that the PS4 Pro will use 5.5GB of its GDDR5 RAM for 4K output and the leftovers of that 8GB to keep the interface running smoothly.

Essentially this allows the PS4 Pro to display games in 4K all while still allowing the console the ability to multitask. This is a big step forward over the original PS4 console. Just for reference, here are the specs for both the consoles for comparison;

Original PS4:

  • CPU: 8 Jaguar Cores at 1.6GHz
  • GPU: AMD GCN, 18 CUs at 800MHz (equivalent to Radeon HD 7850)
  • Memory: 8 GB GDDR5, 176 GB/s

PS4 Pro:

  • CPU: 8 Jaguar Cores at 2.1GHz
  • GPU: 4.20 TFLOPs Polaris GPU
  • Memory: 8 GB GDDR5, 218 GB/s


SOURCE