Sony PlayStation 5 Pro is coming with better GPU, more memory bandwidth

Last month a rumor did the rounds claiming a PlayStation 5 Pro was coming, and today a new report confirms this, while adding some more details about the console. Sony is apparently already asking developers to ensure their games are compatible with the upcoming PS5 Pro, highlighting a focus on improving ray tracing.

The PS5 Pro is allegedly codenamed Trinity, and it's said to have a more powerful GPU and a slightly faster CPU mode. The changes in the Pro model are all supposed to make the console more capable of rendering games with ray tracing enabled, or hitting higher resolutions and frame rates in certain titles.

GPU rendering should be about 45% faster than on the non-Pro PS5, according to alleged documents outlining the new console's features. The GPU will be larger and will also use faster memory to improve ray tracing. In fact Sony boasts about using a "more powerful ray tracing architecture" in the aforementioned documents.

As the name implies, the Pro should be seen as a high-end version of the PS5, which strongly hints at the fact that the 'vanilla' version will remain on sale after the launch of the obviously more expensive Pro. Sony wants developers to have a single package that will support both.

Speaking of which, developers are allegedly already able to order test kits and Sony wants every game submitted to certification from August onwards to be compatible with the PS5 Pro. The previous rumor on the matter talked about a release before the end of year holiday shopping season, and this timeline for developers aligns with that.

The CPU will be the same as in the non-Pro PS5 but it will have a new mode allowing it to clock higher - 3.85 GHz. That's about 10% more than the regular console at 3.5 GHz. Interestingly, the higher clock mode will also require more power to be allocated to the CPU, meaning the GPU will get less - in this mode the GPU is to be downclocked by around 1.5%.

Memory bandwidth will be 576GB/s in the Pro, up from 448GB/s in the PS5, and the memory system should also be marginally more efficient. Games will be able to use an additional 1.2GB of system memory on the PS5 Pro, up to 13.7GB overall (compared to 12.5GB on the existing version).

The PS5 Pro also comes with a "custom architecture for machine learning" and supports 300TOPS of 8-bit computation. Sony's PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling solution will use about 250MB of memory, and will introduce around 2ms of latency when upscaling 1080p to 4K, and the company is working on supporting resolutions up to 8K.

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