Sony's PS5 Pro is confirmed, and developers are gearing up for its arrival.

 

Sony urges developers to prepare games during the summer, emphasizing the importance of integrating ray-tracing support.

Sony is gearing up to launch an upgraded PS5 console, potentially by the year's end. Following recent leaks of PS5 Pro specifications, The Verge has acquired a comprehensive list of specs for the upcoming console. According to sources familiar with Sony's strategy, developers are already tasked with ensuring game compatibility with the new console, with a particular emphasis on enhancing ray tracing.

Under the codename Trinity, the PlayStation 5 Pro model is set to feature a more robust GPU and a slightly faster CPU mode. Sony's advancements suggest that the PS5 Pro will excel in rendering games with ray tracing enabled and achieving higher resolutions and frame rates in select titles. Sony is actively urging developers to leverage graphics features like ray tracing with the PS5 Pro, and games offering significant enhancements will bear the label 'Trinity Enhanced' or 'PS5 Pro Enhanced'.

According to documents detailing the upcoming console, Sony anticipates that GPU rendering on the PS5 Pro will be approximately 45% faster than the standard PlayStation 5. The PS5 Pro's larger GPU and faster system memory aim to enhance ray tracing performance in games. Additionally, Sony is implementing a more robust ray tracing architecture in the PS5 Pro, promising up to three times faster speeds compared to the regular PS5.

Trinity is described as a high-end version of the PlayStation 5," states one document, with Sony confirming its intention to maintain sales of the standard PS5 alongside this new model. Sony anticipates game developers will create a unified package compatible with both the PS5 and PS5 Pro consoles, allowing existing games to be patched for improved performance.

I understand developers can currently order test kits, and Sony anticipates that every game submitted for certification in August will be compatible with the PS5 Pro. Insider Gaming initially reported the complete PS5 Pro specifications and suggested the console is slated for release during the 2024 holiday season.

While Sony enhances the GPU capabilities of the PS5 Pro, the CPU will remain the same as the standard PS5, but with a new mode that boosts its clock speed. According to a document sent to developers, Trinity will feature a mode targeting a CPU frequency of 3.85GHz, approximately 10 percent higher than the regular PS5. Sony will provide developers with the option to choose between a 'standard mode' at 3,5GHz or the 'high CPU frequency mode' at 3,85GHz.

The standard mode functions similarly to a standard PS5, allocating a specific power budget to the CPU. It operates at 3.5GHz under optimal conditions or lower frequencies during 'power-intensive operations.' Sony notes that such occurrences are infrequent, with any unused power on the CPU side redirected to the GPU.

In the new high CPU frequency mode for the PS5 Pro, more power is directed to the CPU, leading to a slight reduction in allocation to the GPU. Sony states that the GPU is downclocked by approximately 1.5 percent in this mode, resulting in a marginal decrease of around 1 percent in performance.

The PS5 Pro will introduce changes to system memory for developers. While the standard PS5 memory operates at 448GB/s, Sony is enhancing this by 28 percent to 576GB/s on the PS5 Pro. Sony notes that due to the enhanced efficiency of the memory system on the PS5 Pro, the bandwidth gain may exceed 28 percent.

Developers will have increased access to overall system memory on the PS5 Pro. Games can make use of an additional 1.2 GB of system memory, totaling 13 .7 GB overall, compared to the 12 .5 GB allocated to games on the base PS 5.

The boost in memory speed and allocations could be beneficial for Sony's new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) support. This feature serves as Sony's upscaling solution akin to Nvidia's DLSS or AMD's FSR, enhancing frame rates and image quality on PlayStation. Sony has developed a custom architecture for machine learning on the PS5 Pro, capable of supporting 300TOPS of 8 - bit computation.

This new architecture backs Sony's custom PSSR upscaling solution, aimed at replacing a game's existing temporal anti-aliasing or upsampling implementation. Sony highlights that the inputs are akin to DLSS or FSR, with full HDR support included. This feature demands approximately 250MB of memory, hence the enhanced memory allocations on the PS5 Pro are advantageous. Sony mentions a latency of around 2 ms for upscaling a 1080p image to 4 K, and the company is actively working towards supporting resolutions up to 8 K and further refining latency in the future.

If developers can prepare their games in time, I anticipate a PS5 Pro launch this holiday season. Sony seems to be following a similar strategy to the PS4, with a 'Slim' PS5 model followed by a Pro edition. I expect to see an expanded library of existing games optimized for the PS5 Pro launch, along with new first-party games gradually incorporating enhanced ray-tracing support for this new console.