Listen here on your chosen podcast platform.
Sony has shared a promotional image that appears to confirm the leaked PS5 Pro design that was revealed recently.
The official pic, which was released to mark PlayStation’s upcoming 30th anniversary celebration, contains a silhouette of a console that looks remarkably similar to a sketch originally shared by a reliable French leaker.
Sony’s illustration features a backdrop composed of PlayStation hardware and peripherals, artfully arranged to form the shapes found on its controller buttons.
Look closely, and you’ll see that one of the consoles in the center of the collage looks like the spitting image of the leaked PS5 Pro design (pictured below), complete with the lines (or slits) down the middle of its side panels.
Fans are convinced this is the more powerful version of Sony’s latest console that has been rumoured for months.
"You can see the PS5 Pro in the button art,” remarked a user in the comments section of the post.
“Check image above, PS5 Pro teaser!!!!!” wrote another excited user in all-caps.
Sony hasn’t confirmed whether the pic is indeed of the PS5 Pro, but we may not have long to wait to see the console.
Here’s what we know about the new system that is destined to be on the top of gamers’ wishlists this Xmas.
PlayStation 5 Pro release date
Leakers are convinced that Sony will officially announce the PS5 Pro as soon as mid-September 2024 at a State of Play event, with pre-orders beginning shortly after the announcement.
Unveiling the new hardware so close to the Tokyo Games Show, which kicks off on September 26, makes sense. Sony is expected to have a massive presence at the gaming event in its native Japan, making it the ideal showcase for a new console.
Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson, a prominent gaming reporter who first outed the existence of the PS5 Slim months ahead of its launch late last year, claimed the PS5 Pro could be released in late 2024. The same site is now reporting that it could land sometime in November, according to its unnamed sources.
Sony was reportedly telling developers that PS5 Pro games must be approved by July 30, per Henderson, and that all titles released after September 15 must be able to run on the new system with support for higher frame rates and resolutions.
You can expect to pay more for the new model than the current PlayStation 5, however.
During an investor call in February, Sony Interactive Entertainment president Hiroki Totoki said it would be “very difficult” to cut the price of the current console. In previous generations, Sony reduced the cost of manufacturing the system as the generation progressed. This time around? Not so much.
Sony is tapping AMD for the PS5 Pro’s chip
A new leak suggests the PS5 Pro will pack the latest in graphics processing technology from chip giant AMD.
Although Sony has yet to officially announce the rumoured console (an upgraded version of the almost four-year-old PS5), leakers have gone ahead and detailed some of its biggest improvements.
The latest info gives us an even better idea of the PS5 Pro’s enhanced graphics output. Specifically, a dataminer called Kepler, who previously leaked specs about the console, claims it will utilise the ray-tracing upgrades from AMD’s upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards.
Reeling off a list of RDNA 4 features on X (formerly Twitter), Kepler said the likes of double ray-tracing, wave matrix multiply accumulate and new data prefetcher will all be available on the PS5 Pro.
Not familiar with the jargon? All you need to know is that it could enable the PS5 Pro to deliver a substantial leap in graphical fidelity and performance over its predecessor.
Ray tracing is a relatively recent technique in games, where the behaviour of light is modelled to create more realistic reflections, shadows and lighting effects. It can look spectacular, but requires a lot of computing power.
Some of the new RT features coming with gfx12/RDNA4. Most if not all of these should be in the PS5 Pro too 🙂 pic.twitter.com/AO5HaxJlMK
— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) July 21, 2024
While the PS5 Pro is rumored to be primarily based on RDNA3 architecture, that’s still an upgrade over the RDNA 2 card inside the regular PS5. Dipping into RDNA 4 could result in the system handling ray-tracing calculations twice as fast, producing more lifelike lighting and reflections in games. Meanwhile, Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate and the new data prefetcher are designed to boost performance.
It’s rumoured to be 45 per cent more powerful
The PS5 Pro will have around 45 per cent more gaming power than today’s PlayStation 5.
That’s according to the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead, which posted this information after accessing documents distributed among PlayStation development partners. If a PlayStation 5 Pro is coming, the folks making games for it need to know what it can do.
The big change is in the GPU, the graphics processor. The Pro is also expected to use the same core CPU processor as the current console — but with a boosted mode that adds up to an extra 10 per cent power when needed.
Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro has an internal codename of Trinity, but it’s unlikely to be used once the console is available. The PlayStation 4 Pro’s codename was “Neo”, for example. Perhaps someone at Sony PlayStation is really into The Matrix.
The console has faster system memory too, able to ferry data at 576 GB/s, a 28 per cent increase from the 448GB/s of today’s PlayStation 5.
What will this mean for actual games? We are likely to see significant increases in the use of ray tracing in games, and sharper, cleaner-looking visuals.
Increased GPU power will also let the PlayStation 5 Pro render games at higher resolutions. However, what we see when the console comes out will be guided by PSSR. This stands for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. It’s a proprietary upscaling technology that uses machine learning to make lower-resolution graphics look higher-res.
This concept is common and available in AMD’s FSR 2, Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS. But a custom Sony take on the tech could give the PlayStation 5 yet more leverage over Microsoft’s Xbox series.
The PlayStation 5 Pro leak also suggests the system will have 67 teraflops of graphics power. While meaningless to most, this figure is much higher than the 12 teraflops of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
While the figures are not directly comparable, even after halving this to 33.5 teraflops to bring them to the same 32-bit ballpark, a dramatic performance increase is likely.
