Rumors surfaced last month that a PlayStation 5 Pro was coming, and today a new report confirms this and adds more details about the console. It appears Sony is already asking developers to ensure their games are compatible with the upcoming PS5 Pro, highlighting its focus on improving ray tracing.
The PS5 Pro is said to be codenamed Trinity and is said to feature a more powerful GPU and a slightly faster CPU mode. The changes in the Pro model are all aimed at allowing the console to render games with ray tracing enabled and achieve higher resolutions and frame rates for certain titles.
According to a document that purportedly outlines the new console’s features, GPU rendering should be around 45% faster than the non-Pro PS5. GPUs are larger and faster memory is also used to improve ray tracing. In fact, Sony boasts in the aforementioned document that it uses a “more powerful ray tracing architecture.”
As the name suggests, the Pro should be considered a high-end version of the PS5, which strongly hints at the fact that the “vanilla” version will continue to be sold even after the launch of the obviously more expensive Pro. Sony wants to give developers a single package that supports both.
Speaking of which, developers can already order test kits, and Sony says it hopes all games submitted for certification from August onwards will be compatible with the PS5 Pro. Previous rumors on the subject had talked about a release before the holiday season, and this timeline for developers is in line with that.
The CPU is the same as the non-Pro PS5, but with a new mode that allows for higher clocks (3.85 GHz). This is about 10% higher than a regular console at 3.5 GHz. Interestingly, higher clock modes require more power to be allocated to the CPU and less power to the GPU. In this mode, the GPU is downclocked by approximately 1.5%.
Memory bandwidth will go from 448GB/s on the PS5 to 576GB/s on the Pro, and the memory system should also be slightly more efficient. The game will now be able to use an additional 1.2 GB of system memory on PS5 Pro, bringing the total up to 13.7 GB (compared to his 12.5 GB in the existing version).
PS5 Pro also features a “custom architecture for machine learning” and supports 300TOPS of 8-bit operations. Sony’s PlayStation Spectrum Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling solution uses about 250MB of memory and introduces about 2ms of delay when upscaling 1080p to his 4K. The company is working on support for up to 8K resolution.
