At a conference in Sony's San Mateo HQ, Mark Cerny revealed that the PS4 Pro uses two chips, one for when the console is playing existing games, and both for when Pro games are being played.
Cerny said: "We doubled the GPU size by essentially placing it next to a mirrored version of itself, sort of like the wings of a butterfly [...] That gives us an extremely clean way to support the existing 700 titles. We just turn off half the GPU and run it at something quite close to the original GPU."
Sony also felt that games needed roughly 10 per cent more memory, hence their decision to add a gigabyte of conventional DRAM. "On a PS4 standard model, if you're switching between an application, such as Netflix, and a game, Netflix is still in system memory even when you're playing the game. We use that architecture because it allows for a very quick swap between applications," he explained. "On PS4 Pro, we do things differently, when you stop using Netflix, we move it to the slow, conventional gigabyte of DRAM. Using that strategy frees up almost one gigabyte of the eight gigabytes of GDDR5. We use 512MB of that freed up space for games, which is to say that games can use 5.5GB instead of the five and we use most of the rest to make the PS4 Pro interface - meaning what you see when you hit the PS button - at 4K rather than the 1080p it is today."
How do you think the PS4 Pro will perform?