Sony’s upcoming PS5 Pro is expected to be up to three times faster than its predecessor and could potentially be released during the holiday season of 2024
Sony’s first-party studios have been reportedly testing PS5 Pro development kits for several months.
Sony is reportedly developing a PlayStation 5 Pro model with a significantly more powerful GPU, potentially up to three times faster for specific tasks compared to existing PS5 models. According to YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead, who claims to have accessed a technical overview document for the PS5 Pro codenamed Trinity, the leaked specifications have been confirmed by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson. The console is said to be scheduled for release during the holiday season of 2024.
Details from the leaked technical document mention 67 teraflops of 16-bit floating point calculations, equivalent to around 33.5 teraflops of single-precision compute. This represents a reported 45 percent rendering performance improvement over the base PS5 model, which has 10.28 teraflops. However, direct comparisons based solely on teraflops can be challenging due to changes in AMD’s RDNA architecture. While the GPU performance increase seems significant, comparing the base PS5 with the PS5 Pro would be more accurate at around 10.28 teraflops vs. approximately 17 teraflops.
Sony appears to be transitioning from using an AMD Radeon RX 6700 GPU in the PS5 to something resembling the Radeon RX 7800 XT for the PS5 Pro. This upgrade could lead to more impressive performance, particularly in ray-traced games. According to Henderson, the PS5 Pro might offer triple the ray tracing performance, with a potential fourfold improvement in certain scenarios.
Further details provided by Henderson include the PS5 Pro featuring a detachable disc drive, following the recent PS5 redesign. Additionally, the Pro model may boast system memory operating at 576 GB/s, representing a 28 percent increase over the PS5, along with enhanced audio hardware capable of handling more effects. The PS5 Pro is also expected to share the same CPU as the base PS5 but with a “High CPU Frequency Mode” that can boost clocks up to 3.85GHz, resulting in a 10 percent performance boost. However, activating this mode may slightly reduce GPU performance by approximately 1.5 percent.
The leaked documents also mention PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a feature that could leverage PlayStation’s machine learning for image upscaling similar to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR. This could include upscaling to 8K resolutions in future iterations and improve ray tracing performance on the rumored PS5 Pro hardware.
While Moore’s Law is Dead hasn’t always been the most reliable source for console leaks, Henderson’s reporting suggests that Sony’s first-party studios have been testing PS5 Pro devkits since September, with third parties gaining access in January. Henderson previously mentioned a PS5 Pro in development with a target release date of November 2024, indicating that Sony might be on track to meet that timeline.
