It’s looking more and more likely that Sony will release the rumoured PlayStation 5 Pro this holiday.
On Monday, The Verge published a new story reporting on the specs of the upgraded PS5, mostly corroborating what the lesser-known but likewise credible site Insider Gaming revealed last month. Per The Verge, the console, codenamed Trinity, will include a GPU mode that is “about 45 percent faster” and a CPU mode “around 10 percent faster” than the standard PS5, respectively.
The company is specifically said to be pushing for ray-tracing support with Trinity, although higher resolutions and frame rates would also be possible with certain titles. Games that specifically take advantage of the upgraded console would be labelled as “PS5 Pro Enhanced.”
Elsewhere, The Verge reports that system memory is going up from 448GB/s on the standard PS5 to 576GB/s on the Pro — a 28 percent increase. Games will also be able to use an additional 1.2GB of system memory on the PS5 Pro, which works out to 13.7GB overall compared to the 12.5GB for games on the base PS5.
The Verge adds that Sony’s new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) support will be introduced with the PS5 Pro is effectively the company’s upscaling counterpart to the likes of Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. To that end, Sony has developed a “custom architecture for machine learning” on the PS5 Pro, which supports 300TOPS of 8-bit computation.
To prepare for launch, Sony will require in August that every game submitted for certification from then on will need to be compatible with the PS5 Pro. Presumably, the company will also push for older popular games to receive a patch to become PS5 Pro Enhanced as well.
The August window also lines up with Insider Gaming‘s report that Sony aims to launch the PS5 Pro this holiday. This would follow last year’s release of the PS5 refresh, informally referred to as the ‘PS5 Slim.’
What both Insider Gaming and The Verge have yet to reveal, however, is how much the PS5 Pro will cost. For context, the standard PS5 and its Digital Edition counterpart cost $649 and $579, respectively.
Of course, one may also wonder why a PS5 Pro is even necessary. On the one hand, Sony is no doubt following a trend last year, where both it and Xbox released mid-generation updates to their respective PS4 and Xbox One consoles.
But on the flip side, this console generation has so few games that fully take advantage of current-gen hardware to begin with. On the first-party front, many PlayStation 5 games are also available on PlayStation 4, including Sackboy: A Big Adventure, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarök and Gran Turismo 7.
Otherwise, only a small handful of titles, like Demon’s Souls, Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, are actually PS5-only. Even if we extend that to third-party PS5 titles like Deathloop, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Stellar Blade and Dragon’s Dogma II, the list still isn’t massive. And that’s to say nothing of the several enhanced PS5 re-releases Sony has already done, including Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut and The Last of Us Part I remake and Part II Remastered.
That said, some have pointed out that Sony releasing the PS5 Pro this holiday may actually be a clever move given that Grand Theft Auto VI is set to release next year. Without a confirmed PC version of the game, the PS5 Pro would, in theory, be the best place to play the next GTA game, which will be a surefire smash hit at launch. That alone could drive strong sales towards the Pro, especially among those who haven’t yet made the jump to the current generation of consoles.
For now, though, we need Sony to first unveil the all-but-confirmed PS5 Pro, and it remains to be seen when that may happen.
Source: The Verge
