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Why it matters: There is little to no doubt that Sony is preparing to launch an upgraded PlayStation 5. Whether it comes this year or next remains to be seen, but rumors strongly suggest a Holiday 2024 release. The latest leaks suggest it should be an exciting upgrade over the current regardless of when it arrives.
Sony has remained tightlipped on a midlife refresh. In fact, it hasn’t even announced its intention to launch a PlayStation 5 Pro SKU. However, history and numerous leaks assure us that “Project Trinity” (PS5 Pro) is coming – and soon.
Last December, RedGamingTech provided some raw PS5 Pro specs, suggesting Sony is considerably upgrading its console. The leak was speculatory, and there was no evidence other than word of mouth supporting it. Insiders said the PS5 Pro should have an 8-core Zen 2 CPU, 30 WGP GPU (60 compute units), 16 GB 18 Gbps RAM, and a 256-bit memory bus.
Last night, reliable leaker Tom from Moore’s Law Is Dead revealed internal Sony documentation that confirms the RGT rumors and provides a bit more information on performance. The memo appears to be a summary presentation of various selling points Sony shared with its partners.
The PS5 Pro’s APU allegedly has a more capable GPU, providing a 45-percent performance boost over the standard PS5. It’s not as substantial as the 50-60 percent previous rumors suggested, but Sony says the GPU is 2-4 times faster when handling ray tracing. This claim jives with an earlier leak claiming that ray-tracing would be twice as fast.
The upgraded machine also has 300TOPS of 8-bit integer machine learning and 67 TFLOPS/16-bit floating point performance. The current PS5 churns out 10.28 TFLOPs/32-bit. So, by comparison, the Pro should have more than three times the floating point performance (33.5 TFLOPs when adjusted for bit difference) than the PS5 and just under 3x against the Xbox Series X (12 TFLOPs. Granted, floating point performance does not necessarily translate across architectures, but apples-to-apples, the Pro model should have a 200-percent boost against the standard SKU.
Sony also introduced a proprietary super-resolution tech. PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) is Sony’s answer to DLSS. The document describes it as a “temporal anti-aliasing upscale” that leverages machine learning. It is similar to DLSS and FSR and supports full HDR and dynamic resolution.
Sony designed the tech to upscale PS5 games to 4K resolution, but the document mentions 8K support in the same breath. Since virtually nothing from PlayStation takes advantage of 8K yet, MLID speculates that PSSR is not just a “one-off” that Sony threw in as PS5 Pro marketing. It appears this will be a tech that the company plans to iterate and improve on for future consoles.
As always, take your daily dose of salt with rumors. Although MLID is reliable and the papers appear legitimate, it’s still a pre-release document. Things can change, and forgeries sometimes happen. However, if things pan out, Sony could be about to sink Microsoft’s Xbox ship.
Image credit: Trusted Reviews
