We’ve been seeing rumors of a PS5 Pro for a while now, and intergenerational renewal a Sony console that will arrive to fill the gap that will remain in the second half of the PS5’s lifecycle between it and the launch of the PS6. Its arrival is expected at the end of this year, although the truth is that thanks to all the leaks that have been produced, we already have a pretty clear idea of ​​what to expect in terms of performance.

Generally speaking, the PS5 Pro will not be a big revolution compared to the PS5, and the truth is that this is not a problem because it does not even aspire to it, because as I said at the beginning, it will not mean a generational change. Its approach will be the same as what we saw with the PS4 Pro with respect to the PS4, which means will be stronger and it will offer a higher level of graphic quality in current games but without major changes at the architectural level nor components.

On a technological level, the big news that the PS5 Pro could contain, according to the latest rumors, will be a a new scaling technique that it would be supported by artificial intelligence and that it would have acceleration at the hardware level. This is undoubtedly the most interesting of all the information that has emerged so far, but it raises a lot of doubts, as things have been left up in the air that do not quite fit the supposed specifications of the console.

Today we finally have a large amount of information that helps us resolve these doubts, and I will go over it in detail with all of you so you know what to expect. The first thing we’ll look at is how Sony will be able to implement the smart upscaling technology on the PS5 Pro, and then we’ll talk about what we can expect from it.

The PS5 Pro’s secret weapon will be its own intelligent scaling

And it’s identified as PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a hardware-accelerated intelligent image resizing and reconstruction technology that will be able to convert 1080p to 2160p with minimal performance impact. In theory, this process of scaling and image reconstruction could be completed in just 2 millisecondswhich is impressive because we’re talking about a delay that would have very little impact.

The ceiling of this upscaling technology would be 4K, but the possibility of reaching 8K is being considered with future improvements and patches in the development kit. And speaking of development, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution does not require individual training in every game and will be very easy to implement, so much so that according to the source, the technology will directly replace the smoothing and temporal rescaling techniques that games currently use, meaning that it can be implemented directly and without complications.

It is important to be clear that when scaling from 1080p to 2160p we are actually working with slightly more than 2 million pixelss, which represents a huge difference compared to s 8.29 million pixels that we would have to drive in 2160p. This is equal to work with 4 times less pixels, and it should allow a huge performance improvement, although of course the image quality we get when scaling always depends on the base pixel count, and the lower the pixel count, the lower the final quality will be.

All scaling and image reconstruction technology has resource-level costs, though it will ultimately end up improving performance in general, and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution will be no exception. The PS5 Pro will have its own architecture to accelerate artificial intelligence and deep learning that will be able to deliver the performance 300 TOPsand that will be the central pillar upon which this intelligent scaling technology will be based.

This dedicated hardware and development-level optimizations that Sony’s kit will offer will allow the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution to have an impact of just 2ms when upscaling from 1080p to 2160p, as I said before, and you will only need to set aside about 250 MB of memory perform operations and workloads related to image scaling and reconstruction. It will also be compatible with dynamic resolution and HDR, two keys that would make it one of the most complete solutions in its class.

More ray tracing performance and automatic enhancements in PS5 games

If we talk about the PS5 Pro and its power, we have to distinguish two levels, rasterization and ray tracing. According to the information we have right now, this new console will offer 45% more rasterization performance compared to the PS5 and In ray tracing, you can multiply the power by up to three said console. This will be possible thanks to the use of a GPU based on the RDNA 3 architecture, although it is said to have some exclusive RDNA 4 features.

Going deeper into the GPU, which is undoubtedly the most interesting part of the PS5 Pro, it will be integrated into the same package as the CPU, which means that we will once again find the APU. It will have a total of 60 compute units, but four will be disabled, meaning that it will have a total of 56 active computing units. This is equal to 3,584 shaders224 texturing units, 96 ROPs, 56 cores for ray tracing acceleration and 112 cores for AI, if the structure of the RDNA 3 architecture that we know is preserved.

The power of that GPU would be 67 TFLOPs in FP16 (33.5 TFLOPs in FP32). In comparison, the Radeon RX 7700 XT performs at 35.17 TFLOPs at FP32 and reaches 70.34 TFLOPs at FP16. This gives us an idea of ​​where this chip will go approximately and allows us to estimate which graphics card the PS5 Pro GPU is equivalent to.

The CPU will also be more powerful, but in this case the development will be less because The Zen 2 architecture will be retained and the number of 8 cores and 16 threads. The significant difference will only be in the working speed, which could go up to 4.4 GHz, as well as the unified memory, which will retain the capacity of 16 GB, but will offer more bandwidth thanks to the increase in working frequencies. , which will go up to 18 Gbps. We also don’t expect any major changes for SSDs.

PS5 Pro will be able to run all PS5 games without problems thanks to the increased performance these will run at a higher resolution and have a higher FPS rate. This reminds me a lot of the boost mode that Sony introduced with the PS4 Pro, as it was exactly what allowed the console’s greater raw power to be used to improve performance and resolution without having to introduce changes or optimizations to games.

How much will the PS5 Pro cost and when will it be released?

As I said before, it will be launched at the end of this year. There is no specific date yet, but we will most likely see it between the months of September, October and November, just before the start of the Christmas campaign. It is an ideal date for the launch of the new console as it will allow Sony to capitalize on this campaign and maximize sales.

The price is a big unknown and the truth is that there are several possibilities, which makes it even more difficult to make a reliable prediction. However, I think so Most likely, the PS5 Pro will eventually hit the market at a price of around 600 or 649 euros maximum and I am convinced that Sony will use the launch of the mentioned console to lower the price of the PS5 a bit, which should be between about 50 and 100 euros.

This price drop will affect both the optical drive version and the fully digital model. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to the launch of this new console, because according to several rumors, the Redmond giant canceled the development of the Xbox Series X Elite, a console that was supposed to be an improved version of the current model and which would be designed to directly compete with the PS5 Pro. Ultimately, your answer may come down to the Xbox Series X price drop.

AI generated cover image.