PS5 Pro will be 'the most powerful console yet' according to tech experts Digital Foundry
Digital Foundry confirms that the PS5 Pro is real, and provides further details on the console's recently leaked specs
✅ The PS5 Pro spec leak has been confirmed by a trusted source
🤔 Digital Foundry has said the PS5 Pro is real and weighed in on the specs
💪 The console is a step over the PlayStation 5, but don’t expect it to perform miracles
📆 It’s due to be released this year, with November the most likely launch month
The tech experts at Digital Foundry have confirmed that the PS5 Pro is real after Sony’s mid-gen console refresh specs leaked online.
The PlayStation 5 Pro is set to offer higher rendering resolutions (expect 4K instead of 1440p below in most games), improved ray tracing capabilities (up to 4x depending on the game), and a new upscaling technology called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) which will boost overall performance even further.
That might be an exciting prospect for those who want a little more graphical fidelity from the PlayStation 5, but as Digital Foundry’s analysis points out, a PS5 Pro is a much harder sell than when Sony launched the PS4 Pro. The PS4 Pro was a tempting upgrade for many as it was designed to take advantage of 4K displays, but the PlayStation 5 Pro doesn’t have this luxury. Support for 8K displays will be extremely limited and they haven’t hit the mainstream yet.
As we already know, the PS5 Pro features the same Zen 2 CPU that’s found in the standard PS5, but developers will be able to activate a 10% boost. However, doing so will decrease the clock speeds of the GPU by about 1.5%. It means that those hoping for the PS5 Pro to run games at higher frame rates, including the few titles that are locked at 30fps, may be disappointed.
It’s the PS5 Pro GPU where the console really flexes its muscles, though. The PlayStation 5 Pro will feature 60 compute units as opposed to 36 on the current model, and deliver 33.5 teraflops of compute performance compared to 10.24TF on the standard PS5.
Almost tripling the teraflop performance of the PS5 makes the PlayStation 5 Pro sound like an absolute monster and potentially a technical marvel, but as Digital Foundry notes, it isn’t quite that simple.
AMD’s latest GPU architecture, RDNA 3, features ‘dual-issue FP32’, which gives developers the ability to double operations at the same clock speeds. But this doesn’t result in gaming performance doubling. Sony has said that the actual real-world boost in games will be around 45%.
To compensate for the increase in compute units, Sony has bumped the memory bandwidth on the PS5 Pro to 18Gbps GGDR6 instead of 14Gbps GGDR6 found in the standard PS5. That’s a 28% improvement overall and means the bandwidth should increase to 576GB/s a second instead of 448GB/s. Sony has also increased the available memory to developers from 12.5GB to 13.7GB for PS5 Pro.
While it’s unlikely that anyone has taken issue with the PS5’s audio, the PlayStation 5 Pro will also improve Sony’s audio engine. It’ll be 35% faster than the current PS5, which should make 3D audio sound even more immersive.
In terms of the 2x to 4x boost in ray tracing performance, don’t expect every PS5 game with ray tracing support to suddenly run at higher frame rates. Instead, Sony says the PS5 Pro’s improved ray tracing capabilities will allow more developers to implement the technology in games where it might not have been possible before or add additional features like shadows or reflections.
Digital Foundry also touches upon Sony’s new proprietary machine-learning upscaling technology, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR. Similar to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD FSR tech, PSSR should be able to upscale a game rendering at 1080p to look convincingly like 4K, at a higher quality than the console’s current AMD-based solution.
Like our PS5 Pro price prediction, Digital Foundry also believes Sony’s new console will cost at least $599 and states that the console is due out this year. Plenty of questions surrounding the PlayStation 5 Pro remain, but we’ll have to wait for an official announcement from Sony to put together the final pieces of the puzzle.