With the world currently discussing and scrutinising a recent and fairly convincing leak of specs and features in a potential upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro console, the highly-regarded video game tech heads at Digital Foundry have jumped in, offering their take on what the reported specs mean in real terms – as well as corroborating their validity.
“The machine is real, it is coming relatively soon – and by and large, the leaks are accurate,” the outlet’s Technology Editor, Richard Leadbetter writes.
There’s a lot to cover over, so if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty of it all you can read DF’s full report right here, but the outlet has said the machine is real and coming soon, and essentially described what sort of performance gains we might see with the PS5 Pro and specifically where we might see them.
The good news is, the beefier GPU combined with Sony’s new machine-learning PSSR upscaling tech and faster ray-tracing performance should help smooth over frame rates in games that aren’t quite hitting the mark on current hardware while also allowing for additional graphical features to be switched on. It also sounds like applying the benefits of PSSR to existing games will be a simple process, which is a big change from the PS4 Pro’s more complex process that meant a huge number of games never took advantage.
The less-exciting news, again according to Digital Foundry, is that with the Pro’s CPU architecture seemingly remaining largely the same, we can’t expect 30FPS titles that are bound by the current CPU spec to suddenly get huge frame rate boosts. So something like Dragon’s Dogma 2, which has recently been the subject of discourse around its 30FPS average on consoles, might come up a touch more stable but won’t necessarily lift to anything significantly higher.
In case you’ve missed the reports I’m recent days, the supposed leaked PS5 Pro specs can be seen below:
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 PRICE
While there’s no mention of price, Digital Foundry’s estimates put the PlayStation 5 Pro at around $599 USD, potentially even without a disc drive included.
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.
