A new PlayStation 5 Pro leak shines even more light on the upgraded CPU, improved ray tracing, and other improvements we can expect with Sony's long-awaited successor to the PS5 console. Best of all, the PS5 Pro sounds as if it could hit stores by the end of this year.
The Verge reported yesterday (April 15) that it had obtained a full spec list for the PS5 Pro, with the list echoing leaked PS5 Pro specifications that leaked last month. Sources familiar with Sony’s plans told the outlet Sony is already asking developers to ensure their games are compatible with the upcoming PS5 Pro, highlighting a focus on the console's improving ray tracing capabilities.
As previously rumored, Sony is reportedly calling the PS5 Pro “ Project Trinity” internally, which is hardly a surprise given the company's history of Matrix-themed codenames for its consoles. (The PS4 Pro was “Neo” and the original PlayStation VR was “Morpheus.")
In terms of specs, the biggest PS5 Pro upgrade appears to be the significantly improved GPU that enables improved ray tracing and Sony's new PSSR upscaling solution supported by machine learning. (More on that in a bit.) GPU rendering should be “about 45 percent faster than standard PlayStation 5,” according to alleged documents about the console.
in the same documents, Sony boasts about using a “more powerful ray tracing architecture” in the PS5 Pro capable of speeds up to three times better than the standard PS5.
Sony is reportedly encouraging developers to use more GPU-intensive effects like ray tracing in future games to fully take advantage of the PS5 Pro's revamped hardware, which can earn these games a PS5 Pro Enhanced label.
For the CPU, Sony is sticking with the same processor as the standard PS5, but with a new mode that allows it to be overclocked to 3.85 GHz — a 10% increase compared to the PS5's 3.5GHz. However, it seems like this mode is activated by a game's needs rather than players themselves as Sony plans to offer developers the option to choose between a “standard mode” at 3.5GHz or the “high CPU frequency mode” at 3.85GHz.
The PS5 Pro will also see improvements to system memory speeds and bandwidth. According to the Verge, the PS5 Pro's system memory runs at 576 GB/s, which is a 28% increase over the standard PS5, and games can use up to 13.7 GB of system memory compared to the standard PS5's limit of 12.5 GB. The PS5 Pro also comes with "custom architecture for machine learning" and supports 300TOPS of 8-bit computation.
That should all be useful for Sony's new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) system, an upscaling solution similar to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR to boost frame rates and image quality. Offering “inputs are quite similar to DLSS or FSR” and full HDR support, PSSR will use about 250MB of memory and introduce around 2ms of latency when upscaling 1080p to 4K. Sony is still working to support resolutions up to 8K and improve latency in the future.
The PS5 Pro is expected to launch by the 2024 holiday season, and we could see an "enhanced" library of existing games debuting along with it. Sony reportedly plans to continue selling the standard PS5 even after the Pro model's launch.
