It is claimed that PS5 Pro is currently under development and will likely be released during the holidays. One of the key features that PS5 Pro will have is Sony’s equivalent of DLSS that will upscale 1080p resolution to 4K. According to sources, the console will be backward compatible with the existing PS5 library through patches.
The rumor was corroborated by the developer documentation spotted by Digital Foundry. PS5 Pro will feature an improved GPU with 2x-4x ray-tracing capabilities. However, it will feature the same Zen 2 CPU with an optional 10% speed increase. The system RAM will be bumped up by 1.2GB, although it will retain 16GB of GDDR6 memory as the traditional model. The specs confirmed by the documentation include:
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- 2-3x Ray-tracing (x4 in some cases)
- 5 Teraflops
- AI Accelerator, supporting 300 TOPS of 8-bit computation / 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point
- Custom machine learning architecture
- PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling) upscaling/antialiasing solution
- Rendering 45% faster than PS5
- Support for resolutions up to 8K is planned for future SDK version
The feature that is grabbing headlines is the PlayStation Spectral Resolution (PSSR) which will provide resolution upscaling like DLSS. The PSSR is expected to have a 250MB memory footprint. Also, the developer doc suggests that the upscaling feature can be backported to existing PS5 titles.
This is different from the ‘back compact plus’ tag on PS4 games running on PS5, which previously needed games to run on modern development environments (SDKs). This feature will be valuable in upgrading current PS5 titles with poor image quality problems.
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“It looks like all games can benefit from PSSR if the developer goes back to them, even if they’re on older SDKs,” said Digital Foundry editor Richard Leadbetter. “It looks like developers can go back to those games and patch in support for PSSR, without having to update to the SDK.”
“This is potentially awesome, because [for] a lot of the games that are out there that are unlikely to receive full upgrades to the latest SDK and the full PS5 Pro features, it does mean that you can at least get the PSSR upgrade in there, if the developer goes back and adds that feature. Which I think is excellent because there have been so many games where – let’s face facts – the resolution has been too low, and the upscaling hasn’t been good enough to offset that.”
PS5 Pro Devkit has been in the hands of developers since last year
Insider Gaming claimed it was shown the documentation of the upcoming PS5 Pro under the condition that it should not be shared publicly or privately. According to Insider Gaming, the Devkits has been in the hands of first-party studios since September 2023 and third-party studios since January 2024. It is also claimed that Testkits which will be identical to the final product will be available in Spring 2024.
Last month CNBC said Sony may “release a refreshed version of the PS5 this year”, citing analysts. The analysts claimed it will help to boost interest in the PS5 console and have hardware that is ready for the release of GTA 6 in 2025.
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In the last earnings call, Sony cut its PS5 sales forecast for the fiscal year ending March from 25 million units to 21 million units. The executives at that time said part of the reason for the anticipated weaker demand was the absence of a major first-party title till the end of the year.
Sony is also fighting a weaker profit margin in its gaming business. During the last earnings call, the management said the goal for its gaming business is to “optimize sales with a greater emphasis on the balance with profits”.
Therefore, analysts believe that Sony will likely not cut the prices of the PS5 Pro when it eventually launches—which has been the trend in the past.
