Apparent PlayStation 5 Pro leaks have been running rampant since the weekend, with claims from the likes of Moore’s Law is Dead (which typically isn’t a great source) and more enthusiastically Insider Gaming (which is a little more reliable) saying that a mid-gen PS5 refresh is on the way in the near future and will feature a seriously beefed-up GPU along with a new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution technology which is seemingly the company’s answer to the likes of DLSS, FSR or XESS and uses upscaling based machine learning to boost image quality and frame rates in support games.
Now, Insider Gaming is back again with even more claims of insider knowledge on this PSSR tech, saying that not only is Sony aiming to leverage it to push 4K gaming at 60FPS on the (supposedly) upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro, but it’s aiming to push that even further on the next iteration of PlayStation hardware with milestones of 4K at 120FPS and 8K at 60FPS. Naturally, as hardware improves over time you’d expect to see resolution and frame rate targets climb but with the current console generation still largely topping out at 30FPS targets with 4K resolutions, it seems Sony could be trying to push things further, faster than it could’ve without something like PSSR.
Of course, it remains to be seen how much of this – if any – is factual, but it’s probably the most convincing set of reports we’ve seen to date around potential new PS5 hardware, and it’s interesting to think about what the future of games consoles can be when factoring in the kinds of image upscaling, reconstruction and frame generation technologies that have long-matured on PC.
Here are the PS5 Pro specs being claimed, again:
PLAYSTATION 5 PRO SPECS
SYSTEM MEMORY
Standard PlayStation 5 – 448 GB/s (14 GT/s)
PlayStation 5 Pro – 576 GB/s (18GT/s) – A 28% increase over the standard console.
Also outlined is that the PlayStation 5 Pro’s system memory is more efficient than the standard console, so the bandwidth gain may increase by over 28%.
CPU
The CPU is identical to the standard PlayStation 5, however, the Pro has a ‘High CPU Frequency Mode”, which takes the CPU to 3.85GHz – A 10% increase over the standard console.
AUDIO
The ACV in the PlayStation 5 Pro runs at a higher clock speed over the standard PlayStation 5, resulting in the ACM library having 35% more performance.
- More convolution reverbs can be processed
- More FFT or IFFT can be processed
GPU
- Rendering 45% faster than PS5
- 2-3x Ray-tracing (x4 in some cases)
- 33.5 Teraflops
- PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling) upscaling/antialiasing solution
- Support for resolutions up to 8K is planned for future SDK version
- Custom machine learning architecture
- AI Accelerator, supporting 300 TOPS of 8 bit computation / 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point
PLAYSTATION 5 PRO RELEASE DATE
Insider Gaming’s own report suggests that the PS5 Pro devkits have been available to first-party studios since September last year, third-party developers since early this year and that testkits will go out in the near future ahead of a tentative 2024 holiday release – which IG also claims could change with the lack of first-party titles on the cards for this year.
