PlayStation might have only just launched its revised, smaller and lighter model PS5 (you can read our review of that here) but if industry “insiders” including the likes of serial tea-spiller Jeff Grubb are to be believed, we’re due to see a proper mid-gen PS5 refresh as soon as early as 2024.
“That PS5 Pro leak is almost certainly real based on what I’ve heard now, Grubb claims in an episode of his Game Mess podcast. “And obviously I’m not the only one out there saying that, but I can throw my confirm, confirm, confirm into the ring for everybody.”
While it’s not unexpected to start hearing rumours of upgraded machines this far into the generation cycle, what’s more interesting about these claims is that PlayStation is supposedly going beyond just the inclusion of more powerful hardware.
The “PS5 Pro” will also apparently include its own proprietary hardware and software for frame reconstruction/generation, not unlike NVIDIA’s game-changing DLSS solution which enables massive boosts to framerate by employing machine learning to effectively upscale lower-resolution images to much higher ones with minimal hit to image quality.
If true, and if a Sony-led solution is effective enough, it could mean some massive boosts to both frame rate and resolution in games. The PS5 is already compatible with older versions of AMD’s take on the technology, FSR, but it’s not close to being as effective as DLSS being driven by dedicated hardware. If PlayStation’s own tech can come close to NVIDIA’s in effectiveness we could start seeing console games running at high resolutions with high frame rates and cutting edge ray tracing features enabled without having to choose between the three or some combination of them.
“The current specs are based on a range of possibilities because they have not actually fully-dialled that in,” Grubb explains.
“The big thing here, like the big feature that this system will support, is Sony’s own proprietary DLSS-like solution, where they use their own machine learning to improve images so they can run things at a really high resolution and really high frame rate, and they would include their own hardware in the PS5 Pro to do this.”
It’s been suggested that this new PS5 could launch around September 2024.
Interestingly, Grubb also says that the same person providing this new information to him on the PlayStation side of things has claimed that Xbox has cancelled its famously-leaked plans to launch a discless version of the Xbox Series X and is instead moving forward plans to release its own updated console – which could even be a fully “next generation” machine.
Now obviously, as trusted as Jeff Grubb seems to be within the industry, the word of one person on a semi-popular podcast “corroborating” rumours is hardly iron-clad confirmations, but if true it could mean very exciting things for the future of console gaming.
