Early PlayStation 5 Pro shipments show some major upgrades over the original, but that AMD GPU wasn't what I expected.

Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro isn't set to launch for two more days, but some lucky buyers have already managed to get one. The PS5 Pro's manual and a tech YouTuber teardown reveal that it has a larger SSD, more RAM for the operating systems, and a different GPU than what was rumoured.

The teardown was performed by Brazilian YouTube channel TAG. They took apart a brand-new PS5 Pro to show us what's inside. Digital Foundry received an early shipment, but they were less eager to break out the screwdrivers.

The Pro isn't nearly as large as the initial images had suggested. The Pro is a little taller and weighs around 500g (18 ounces), but it's not as big as the original PS5.

The teardown manual and video confirm that the new console has a larger SSD--2TB in raw capacity. However, a portion of this is "reserved to be used in connection with console maintenance, administration and additional options."

There's also more RAM, but not the fast GDDR6 that's used by processors. While there's only 16 GB, we don't yet know the clock speed. However, we do know more of it is available to games, as Sony has added 2 GB DDR5 memory to the motherboard. This will be used by the operating system.

The PS5 Pro's most interesting feature is its new APU. It's a semi-custom AMD APU with eight Zen 2 cores and sixteen threads plus a Radeon RDNA GPU. The latter is the biggest surprise for me, as all rumours had pointed to an RDNA 3-based chip.

Sony announced that the PS5 Pro GPU has 67% more compute units compared to the original. The original PS5 graphics chip is RDNA 2-based, with 36 compute units. It has a peak FP32 performance of 10.3 TFLOPs.

The Pro's manual confirms that the PS5 Pro has 60 compute units, and that it is clocked lower than its predecessor (probably around 2,175MHz vs 2,233MHz).

What none of this tells us, is if it's RDNA 3 or just RDNA 2? My initial impression is that is the latter because Sony has marketed the PS5 Pro’s upgraded ray-tracing capabilities as a major step forward for the console.

A 60 compute unit RDNA 3, running at 2,175 MHz should have a peak FP32 performance of 33.4 TFLOPS because there are twice as many ALUs in each compute unit compared to RDNA 2. This might lead one to believe that it is and not inside, but it's important to note that the 'doubled' FP32 output only occurs if the drivers implement a specific instruction.

It is not necessary for an RDNA 3 GPU to be different from an RDNA 2. It's possible that Sony asked AMD to remove the instruction because the PS5 Pro drivers are exclusive to that system.

This is because driver compilers don't have a lot of sophistication and it's hard to get them to know when to use a certain instruction, unless you 'hand-tune' the shader codes afterwards.

By removing this so-called "dual issue" instruction, the compiler has less room to mess up things, although it never seems to be a concern on PCs with RDNA 3 graphics.

The dual-issue instruction is rarely seen in the GPU traces of games I've played on RX 7000 series cards. The extra ALUs may not be used, but this does not mean they are not. RDNA 3 GPUs are able to issue normal instructions in one cycle to all the compute units in a single compute unit when running pixel shading, compared to RDNA 2 chips which took two cycles.

After all this, I still think it's an RDNA 3 chip in the PlayStation 5 Pro.

It's still a bit mysterious what's inside that GPU. We'll have to see it for ourselves when someone takes a good die shot so we can see its internal structure. (Here's hoping Fritzchen Fritz gets the PS5 Pro).

I know that none of this is going to have a significant impact on PC gaming, but I need to satisfy my GPU-phile needs.