The PlayStation 5 Pro has officially been unveiled and developers will be releasing new and improved modes for their games that will take advantage of all this new horsepower. But what will it really mean?

At a recent PlayStation 5 Pro preview event, we spoke to the technical leads of some of PlayStation’s biggest games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2 and more, to discuss what improvements we can now expect There is a more powerful PlayStation 5 on the market.

There are three main features of the PS5 Pro, as lead architect Mark Cerny explained during the announcement presentation. The updated GPU enables 45% faster gameplay rendering, advanced ray tracing provides better lighting effects, and the AI ​​upscaler PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution or PSSR will help further improve graphics.

According to Mike Fitzgerald, Director of Core Technology at Insomniac Games, you’ll see all of this in action in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

“The first major improvement to PlayStation 5 Pro is PSSR, or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, which allows us to improve on our old upscaling mode. We can render at a lower resolution, push it up to full 4K and get a ton of extra detail out of the image,” says Fitzgerald. “The second big thing is that the PS5 Pro has new ray tracing hardware. We have really nice ray-traced reflections all over Spider-Man 2 and getting those to run faster and do more ray tracing is a big deal.”

“And the third big thing of all is that these will be combined to create a new Performance Pro mode, as we call it on the PS5 Pro. You get the image quality and graphics of Fidelity mode with the frame rate of Performance mode.”

The main concern for several technical executives, including the folks at Naughty Dog, was that on the base PS5, players often had to choose between Fidelity mode, which offered better resolution at lower frame rates, typically 30 fps, and Performance mode. Mode that increased the frame rate had to choose frame rate to 60 at the expense of better graphical textures and ray tracing. This choice is no longer necessary on the PS5 Pro, as it can run games at better resolution and higher frame rates.

“Well, the biggest thing is going to be the ability to play at 60 frames per second in 4K, so that was a big deal,” says Travis McIntosh, head of technology at Naughty Dog. “This means we don’t have to make any compromises, so you don’t have to choose between high fidelity and good performance.”

The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the games that will be improved on the PS5 Pro, with the option to play the game with better graphics and still have it run at 60fps via a new Pro mode. But McIntosh says both Fidelity and Performance modes will also be improved on the PS5 Pro.

“There’s more than that, there’s also the fact that High Fidelity mode on the base PS5 looks even better when using Pro. And there are some minor performance issues in the base model PS5’s performance mode, which is also much better. Very solid 60 (fps), much less frame drops if you go pro.”

But McIntosh also says he’s personally excited about PSSR, which uses AI to improve graphics.

“I would say I’m really excited about the possibility of using AI upscaling. As developers, as techies we spend a lot of time worrying about pixel throughput. It’s actually very hard to achieve the goal of getting that many pixels through the game, and now we can focus on the cool graphics stuff we’re doing instead of just increasing the pixel count. So that was a big advantage.”

McIntosh goes into detail about the PSSR technology and how it upscales 1440p resolution to 4K, telling IGN that it “simply delivers a much better result than previous upscalers because it applies not just to our game, but to many, many other games can be trained, and it learns and improves with each iteration, can improve and fix graphical errors, fix artifacts, and learns how to make things look good. For example, foliage is an example in our game that looks really good after the upscaler because the neural network is trained to do foliage really well.”

For Guerrilla Games World Lighting head Roderick van der Steen, the biggest changes to Horizon Forbidden West all have to do with resolution and how improved they will be on the PS5 Pro, from better lighting to textures on characters.

“A big improvement we could achieve by using the PS5 Pro is that we could increase the resolution and the stability of the image, which is what we’ve really focused on in this patch. And various other aspects such as better filtering, better shading and better volumetrics.”

Van der Steen says these improvements will be seen particularly in complicated models. “So fire, holograms, but also skin and hair rendering, where we were able to increase the shadow filtering to get a much smoother and more stable image.”

After all, ray tracing has been around for a few years, but has often been sacrificed on consoles for those who prefer performance mode, which PlayStation says is the majority of gamers. But the PS5 Pro is now able to add better ray tracing while maintaining a higher frame rate. Just ask Jose Villeta, technical director at Avalanche Software, the developers of Hogwarts Legacy.

“One of the few things we’ve been able to improve in our game thanks to the PS5 Pro is that we’ve focused on three areas,” reveals Villeta. “First we integrated PSSR – this results in better upscaled imaging technology. And secondly, we focused on ray tracing, trying to not only enable the best ray tracing capabilities, but also improve on the ray tracing we had before. We were able to create ray traced shadows and increase the percentage of ray traced reflections so they look sharper and have more content and detail.”

The improvements are the result of the better GPU, which Villeta blames for giving Hogwarts more weight. “The extra power allows us to actually make sure that all of our visual modes, we have Fidelity, Fidelity with ray tracing, and Performance mode, all run at a better frame rate.”

Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2, Horizon Forbidden West and Hogwarts Legacy are just four of the many games confirmed to have improvements on the PS5 Pro, and we can expect to see even more Pro-enhanced games, the closer we get to the launch of the new console on November 7th.

For more on the PS5 Pro, check out our full hands-on preview, as well as our interview about what else to expect from the PS5 Pro.

Matt Kim is a senior features editor at IGN. You can reach him @laoftd.