Time to save up: PS5 Pro could arrive this year with way more power under the hood

The Sony PlayStation 5 has been around for a few years, and Sony even refreshed the lineup with a smaller PS5 Slim variant. For most people, either of these consoles would be a fantastic starting point for home entertainment. But if you are looking for something more powerful, Sony appears to have the PS5 Pro lining up for you for this year’s holiday season.

A report from Insider Gaming has revealed several key specifications of the upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro, and it paints a very optimistic picture for the next gaming console from Sony. The report builds upon another report from the YouTube Channel Moore’s Law is Dead, revealing GPU specifications.

Starting with the design, the PS5 Pro could feature a design that has a detachable disc drive, similar to how the PS5 Slim has implemented it.

As for the CPU, the PS5 Pro is said to come with an identical CPU as the regular PS5. However, the PS5 Pro could come with a “High CPU Frequency Mode,” which would take the CPU to 3.85GHz over the current 3.5GHz, which is a 10% increase. A caveat noted for this feature is that it could downclock the GPU, resulting in about 1% lower GPU performance.

But that lower performance may be acceptable, since the GPU is said to come with a notable GPU upgrade. The GPU is said to offer 33.5 Teraflops of single-precision compute, as against the regular PS5’s 10.28 Teraflops. The numbers cannot be directly compared, though, as there are changes in the underlying AMD RDNA architecture, so you could be looking at about 45% faster rendering than the PS5. You can also look forward to 2-3x better ray-tracing performance, going up to even 4x better in some cases.

Other GPU upgrade tidbits include support for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) Upscaling, a custom machine learning architecture, an AI accelerator supporting 300 TOPS of 8-bit computation, and future support for up to 8K resolutions.

RAM could see a good upgrade, too. The RAM is said to be running at 576GB/s, as against the regular PS5’s 448GB/s speeds. This is a 28% increase over the standard console. The RAM is also said to be more efficient, so the bandwidth gain could be even more. Information on storage space is not available beyond its 1TB capacity.

The Audio Compute Voice (ACV) is also said to run at a higher clock speed, with the Audio Compute Module library boasting 35% more performance. The result is that more complex sounds can be processed quickly.

Per the reports, PS5 Pro Devkits have been available to first-party studios since September 2023 and to third-party studios since January 2024. Test kits from Spring 2024 will be identical to the final product. The PS5 Pro is expected to be released in the 2024 holiday season, so the hardware progression is in line. However, the absence of first-party games could alter the release timeline.