Sony's upcoming and much-rumoured PlayStation 5 Pro got some more details leaked this week, and they've added to the sense that the console war is about to take a fresh twist.
Some new specifications for the PS5 Pro have leaked from Sony's own developer portal, and suggest that the console's CPU clock speed will be boosted up to 2.35GHz.
The details also touched on the graphics performance of the new console, pointing towards 30 WGP (Work Group Processors) offering up 33.5 teraflops in performance. For comparison, the standard PS5 has 18 WGP making for around 10.23 teraflops.
That potentially sounds like a massive upgrade in power, although technical reasons mean that it might not be quite as huge as it sounds.
This is particularly down to its GPU's setup, which will bring real efficiency but will eat up some of that headroom.
The GPU and CPU changes will come together, according to analysis from Digital Foundry looking into all of this, to make for definitively improved graphical throughput for most existing titles, especially if and when developers patch their games to allow for better performance on the new hardware.
Sony's own leaked documentation seems to suggest that developers can expect around a 45% boost in graphical capabilities using the PS5 Pro compared to the launch console, or the newer, slimmer PS5, and while that number might not sound like a totally enormous gap, it should be really noticeable.
In particular, given how few games actually run natively at 4K resolution this generation, instead using checkerboarding to upscale to that rate at the cost of sharpness, it could be a welcome boost for both resolution and frame rates in-game.
Needless to say, all of this has gone unconfirmed by Sony itself, and you shouldn't expect any sort of official comment on it imminently. In fact, we don't really know much about the timeline for the PS5 Pro, which is expected before the end of 2024.
When Sony will choose to unveil it isn't clear, and this also means that one major question still hovers over it - what will it look like? The PS5 divided opinion with its futuristic look, and that design language doubtless won't be erased totally, so it'll be curious to see what Sony has cooking.
