Sony is already well advanced on the design of its future PlayStation 5 Pro.
Almost three years to the day after the release of the PlayStation 4 (November 15, 2013), Sony launched the PlayStation 4 Pro (November 10, 2016). A precise timetable that the Japanese firm will not be able to repeat. Indeed, with the PlayStation 5 launching on November 12, 2020, Sony is already "behind schedule" by several weeks! In fact, Sony has yet to announce anything, and no official speech or financial report evoking the future of the PlayStation brand mentions a "5 Pro". However, the rumors have been flying for several days now, and there's every reason to believe that an official announcement could be on the way.
Until the PS4 - and with the exception of the SEGA Megadrive with its 32X - consoles were not entitled to any "revision". They had a lifespan of five, six or seven years, after which a new generation was launched, wiping the slate clean. As early as the PS3, an upward compatibility system had begun to shake things up a little, but it was with the revisions of the PS4 / Xbox One generation that the idea of an "intermediate version" was integrated by the industry. An idea that seems likely to be taken up again for the PS5, according to information relayed by the VideoCardz website. This still hypothetical PS5 Pro would logically be more powerful than the PS5. Much more powerful. In fact, we're talking about 45% more power, with much better ray tracing management and a raw GPU power of 33.5 TeraFLOPs.
BVH8 is interesting, not only confirms PS5 Pro is using RDNA4's RT engine but also confirms RDNA4 doubles RT throughput per cycle, something which hasn't been mentioned in any open source patch yet! 👀 https://t.co/dht9fDWF79
- Kepler (@Kepler_L2) March 17, 2024
Logically, Sony has learned its lesson from AMD and NVIDIA, with the implementation of an oversampling technology called PSSR to enable much smoother animation in 4K (up to 60 frames per second)... and even in 8K (up to 30 frames per second)! On the GPU side, AMD is still on board, with an architecture largely borrowed from RDNA3, delivering two to three times the ray-tracing rendering performance thanks to the 60 computing units and 2.18 GHz frequency of this section of the main chip. On the CPU side, things look a little "wiser", with the 8 Zen 2 cores retained, but a frequency capable of going up to 3.85 GHz. Last but not least, the memory subsystem is said to receive a major boost, with bandwidth up 28% (from 448 GB/s to 576 GB/s) thanks to 16 GB of GDDR6 at 18 Gbps.
As we've already said, these are just rumours, and Sony has yet to announce any tangible details about the PS5 Pro. Nevertheless, the rumors are multiplying, and it wouldn't be out of place to see a refresh of the PlayStation 5 at the end of 2024. To be continued...
