Tom Henderson, a known and apparently reliable leaker has released an article on Insider-Gaming.com stating that Sony is well into the development of the PS5 Pro. The console would have a mid-to-late 2024 release date placing it squarely in the middle of the PS5’s expected lifespan. It may shock you to realize that come November, the PS5 is three years old.
The PS5 is powered by an eight-core AMD Zen 2 APU featuring a RDNA 2 iGPU which can rival the RTX 2070 Super or Radeon 6700XT in the right hands. However, due to the pandemic, the console had a rough start by both being difficult to produce, and difficult to obtain. There were parts shortages for even basic capacitors, and scalpers were using bots to swipe up thousands of units and flip them on markets like eBay. This has lead to an exceptionally long cross platform development cycle where AAA titles were still targeting the far weaker PS4 as their baseline in performance. Very few games have been solely dedicated to the PS5, though they are starting to trickle out.
Unfortunately, the PS5 and it’s Xbox Series X contemporary are having difficulty achieving more than 30 FPS in some of these games even with resolutions falling far below 4K. Star Wars Jedi Survivor recently launched and Digital Foundry found that it was falling into the 20 FPS range with certain scenes.
Developers have also begun to shift to Ray Traced lighting or hybrid systems as the default in many games. The RDNA 2 architecture is weak compared to Nvidia’s Ray Tracing implementation, though it keeps up well in rasterization. Sony has recently filed a patent on boosting Ray Tracing performance.
However, not everyone believes that a PS5 Pro will see the light of day. It certainly isn’t unheard of for companies to develop prototypes and not release them in the console space. Sega was notorious for that. The PS5 and Xbox Series X performance has only recently been unshackled from the chains of the PS4’s weak CPU and GPU, and it takes time for developers to really dig all the performance out of a console. Compare any console’s launch titles to their late life titles and you can see a massive difference. Developers truly learn to optimize for the hardware often down to the metal itself. PS4 launched with Knack and Killzone Shadow Fall. It’s finishing its life with God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, and Horizon Forbidden West. I would never have expected a system that roughly equates to the performance of eight 1.6GHz Athlon 64 cores and a Radeon 7870 with 8GB of total memory to do what has been done with it.
The PS5 still has a lot of untapped potential. Take a look at Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart as an example.
Another question is the pricing. The PS5 has gone through several revisions already to reduce costs but the best method, a large die shrink, still eludes it. Sony managed to knock 13 percent of the size of the PS5’s APU so far, but has yet to bring transistor size down to where it could double the processing power without doubling the silicon size, heat, and PSU requirements. Additionally, Sony only recently has begun producing the PS5 for less than they sell them for. While this is normal for consoles to be sold for a loss with profits made up on software, the rising cost of inflation, aggressive scalping that limits software sales, and aforementioned design requirements make it virtually impossible that Sony could sell a PS5 Pro for the same as the PS5’s current price while breaking even.
As for possible specifications, Henderson did not name any. I would wager that we would be looking at a doubling of the PS5’s performance though. Most like RDNA 3 graphics cores would be used, albeit with Sony’s recent Ray Tracing patents factored in. The CPU is fairly strong this generation of consoles so I wouldn’t expect a substantial boost there. Perhaps a clock bump to the 4GHz range. As for RAM, it’s possible that Sony would push the system memory up slightly. Perhaps 20 or 24GB. However, I wouldn’t expect a giant leap.
It should be an interesting few months as Henderson predicts that first party developers will be getting PS5 Pro development kits soon. Someone is going to leak some info.
Check out the Insider Gaming article by CLICKING HERE.
Alternatively, check out Modern Vintage Gamer’s take on the PS5 Pro in this video.
