Rumor mill: Rumors have circulated all year regarding a more powerful refresh of Sony’s PlayStation 5 console, but a new leaker has provided what is purportedly the first comprehensive spec sheet. Meanwhile, another, more established leaker says we may soon know whether the rumored specs are authentic.
An unverified leaker on the Resetera forums claims the PlayStation 5 Pro will offer a 50-to-60 percent upgrade in rasterization performance while doubling ray tracing performance. The new console may also include hardware for machine learning-based upscaling similar to DLSS or XeSS.
If the information is trustworthy, the PS5 Pro’s improvements appear conceptually similar to those the PlayStation 4 Pro made over its predecessor. Sony might once again use a TSMC die shrink to better GPU performance significantly and deliver a minor CPU upgrade.
The leaker, named “RandomlyRandom67,” claims the PS5 Pro’s SoC, which trusted leaker Kepler_L2 previously called “Voila,” is based on TSMC’s 5nm N4P process. The shift would mark the console’s third semiconductor node after the original PS5’s 7nm N7 and Oberon Plus revision’s 6nm N6.
Yeah I was actually wrong about that �… PS5 Pro uses 60 out of 64 CUs (Viola full config is 2 SE x 2 SA x 8 WGP).
– Kepler (@Kepler_L2) December 11, 2023
Viola’s CPU would retain the PS5’s Zen 2 architecture and slightly enhance the variable clock speed’s cap from 3.5GHz to 4.4GHz. It would feature 64KB of L1 cache per core, 512KB of L2 cache per core, and 8MB of split L3 cache. The information supports Kepler’s observation of a small CPU upgrade. Memory bandwidth rises from 448GB/s to 576GB/s.
Meanwhile, the GPU architecture moves from RDNA 2 to RDNA 3 with some features from AMD’s upcoming RDNA 4 series. Compared to the PS5’s 36 compute units, Random67 claims the upgraded model will include 56, but Kepler says 60. Random67 also claims the PS5 Pro features 3,584 shaders, 224 TMUs, and 96 ROPs.
While traditional rendering performance might only enhance by half, ray tracing performance could more than double due to RDNA 4’s improvements. The new variant might advance the task from shaders onto dedicated RT hardware similar to Nvidia’s RTX GPUs.
Another performance advantage could come from AMD’s recently revealed XDNA2 AI accelerators, which Sony could use for machine learning-based upscaling. Many PS5 games currently utilize upscaling through FSR’s spatial and temporal techniques, but comparisons with DLSS and XeSS propose machine learning could better image quality while drawing fewer “real” pixels, thus conserving horsepower. The feature could serve a role for the PS5 Pro similar to what checkerboard rendering did for the PS4 Pro.
Tom Henderson from Insider Gaming, who in March indicated the upgraded console would focus on improved ray tracing, declined to comment on the new information’s veracity. However, he said Sony expects the PS5 Pro’s specs to leak this month as third-party developers begin to acquire development kits. According to Random67, the company plans for a September 2024 unveiling.
