Insider Gaming has verified the recent specifications of the PlayStation 5 Pro leaked by the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead, while also confirming that the tentative release date of Sony’s upcoming hardware is set for Holiday 2024. Digital Foundry has also confirmed the specifications reported by Tom Henderson and gave some new details regarding the upscaling tech that Sony is working on for the PS5 Pro which will be discussed in detail.
The planned release date is interesting because it coincides just before the much-awaited Grand Theft Auto 6’s release date in Early 2025. Sony currently has no planned exclusive releases later in the year. The release of the PS5 Pro creates an interesting place in the market with the leaked May 2022 roadmap of Xbox confirming that Xbox has no plans to release any ‘Pro’ variation of Xbox Series X and considers Series X itself as their mid-gen refresh.
Tom Henderson is a reliable leaker who has previously leaked Sony hardware correctly with his track record being right always, including the handheld PlayStation Portal.
PS5 Pro Rendering 45% Faster than PS5
Tom Henderson from Insider Gaming previously confirmed that PS5 Pro is being developed at Sony under the codename, ‘Trinity’. Trinity is meant to target improved performance at 4K while also aiming for an 8K performance mode. (Although, the viability of the latter can be debated.) This time through a leaked document from the PlayStation developer portal, he confirmed the specifications first leaked by Moore’s Law is Dead. The leak came about after the information was released to third-party developers and Sony is currently investigating internally to find the source of the leak and prevent this from happening in the future.
The leaked documents entail that the PS5 Pro rendering is 45% faster than PS5 and ray tracing improvements are around 2-3%, with some exceptions of 4%. The PS5 Pro also has a 3x improvement in teraflops with the standard model standing at 10.28 Teraflops and the Pro releasing with 33.5 Teraflops. However, this improvement will not exactly translate to actual performance due to architectural differences. Sony is also working on PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling (PSSR), which is set to be their take on upscaling tech customised exclusively for their platform. Aside from this, it seems Sony partnered with AMD to create custom machine learning architecture, with the AI Accelerator supporting 67 Teraflops at 16-bit floating point. Henderson added in another article later that the PlayStation 5 Pro will feature 576 GB/s (18GT/s) system memory, a 28% gain which could be higher as the memory is more efficient. Disappointingly the PS5 Pro will feature the same CPU as the PS5 however with a 10% overclock in High CPU Frequency Mode, which will decrease GPU performance by around 1.5%. While PS5 Pro will have the same amount of memory, it will be able to offer developers 13.7GB memory for games, which is a 1.2GB rise.
As with the PS5 Slim, the PS5 Pro will feature the same detachable disk drive design meant to stay competitive with pricing.
PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR)
Perhaps the most interesting addition is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling (PSSR), which is Sony’s take on upscaling tech similar to FSR/DLSS. According to Digital Foundry, the upscaling tech is backwards compatible and can be used on the standard PlayStation 5 by developers through a simple patch. Tom Henderson added in his recent article that internally Sony’s ambitions for the PSSR are 4K120 and 8K60 which seems baffling at first, but this target is meant for future console iterations since the current targets for the PlayStation 5 Pro are 4K60 and 8K30. The internal 8K targets are surprising since 8K still isn’t viable and consoles have not properly utilised 4K but the marketing talk has jumped over to the 8K resolution already. PSSR requires 250MB to run on the console.
Digital Foundry adds that due to low internal resolutions and the use of FSR2, the standard PS5 has faced major image quality issues which should be wiped out with the extra GPU headroom offered by PS5 Pro, along with the help of PSSR.
PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution could be a game changer and may be able to compensate for the small improvements in the PlayStation 5 Pro. Developers have had to resort to FSR for PlayStation 5 which is still miles behind DLSS. If PlayStation can optimise the upscaling tech enough to compete with DLSS, it could be a big developmental help and make real-time improvements that could make the case for PS5 Pro. In the coming months, as more details are revealed, we will have to see if PlayStation plans to restrict the upscaling tech to the Pro variant only to push consumers to buy it or if it will also add it to the standard PS5 model. It will be fascinating to see if Sony pushes PSSR console-wide and optimises games themselves for it, similar to the FPS Boost employed by Xbox which did not require developer patches to make full gains of the next-gen performance that Series X offered.
According to Tom Henderson, devkits were dispatched to first-party developers since Septemeber 2023, with third-party developers receiving them in January 2024. Test kits identical to the final product will be available starting in Spring 2024, and the final release is planned for Fall 2024.
While most consumers will not be sure of the need for a PlayStation 5 Pro it certainly can fill a market gap for consumers looking to finally move on from 30FPS in games. Also, PlayStation 5 Pro could be marketed as the best platform to play Grand Theft Auto 6 on considering the game will probably not launch on PC, and the PS5 Pro is set to be the most powerful console. Interestingly, Digital Foundry is not optimistic about Grand Theft Auto 6 hitting 60fps on the console which will surely disappoint fans who were looking to pick up the console to play the game at the best possible settings. All is not lost though as Rockstar will surely utilise the extra headroom to offer better visuals on the Pro model.Â
We will keep you up to date as more verified details are released for the PlayStation 5 Pro on EsportsNext. Meanwhile, check out our article comparing the standard PS5 with the PS5 Slim and if it’s worth it.
