Gaming hardware leaker Tom Henderson and Insider Gaming head reported on X that Sony expects all the specifications of its upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro console to leak this month. According to Henderson, Sony believes this because PS5 Pro dev kits will be making their way to third-party studios this month, opening up the opportunity for leakers to get a sneak peek at the upcoming hardware.
Henderson's post was made in response to another post made by X user, Nasser, who asked Tom Henderson about the legitimacy of a new PS5 Pro hardware rumor .
Can't comment on other peoples leaks because I don't know. Internally, Sony is expecting full specs to leak this month because of dev ket distribution to 3rd party studios. https://t.co/sJ9x4OGjtQDecember 11, 2023
If Henderson's response is legitimate, it confirms that Sony is already well underway working on its mid-cycle refresh console update — currently dubbed the PS5 Pro by the leaks and rumor mill. On top of this, the console is seemingly already in a functional state and will be provided to game developers in the form of dev kits shortly.
This makes sense, considering we are almost at the halfway point in the expected life cycle for the latest-generation consoles. It's been over three years since the PS5 arrived on the scene, and four years is generally the halfway point between the beginning of a new console generation and when the next-gen consoles arrive. Traditionally, console makers like Sony and Microsoft often create a mid-cycle console refresh, to drum up sales and interest in what is somewhat stale hardware. Usually, these consoles come with upgraded hardware to boost performance and graphics quality.
We could see an announcement for the PS5 Pro as early as 2024, if this information is legitimate.
Leaked PS5 Specs from Nasser
@_Tom_Henderson_ how accurate is this ?https://t.co/ziKxpMYrS5December 11, 2023
The X post-Henderson responded to had some very interesting details on the new PS5 pro. If the rumor is true, the PS5 Pro will feature a seriously upgraded GPU, boasting an architecture that is two generations newer than the GPU found in the outgoing PS5.
But before we dive in, it's worth noting that Henderson himself confirmed that he doesn't know the legitimacy of this leak, so take this new information with a big dose of salt.
The leak originates from a user known as RandomlyRandon67 on the Resetera forums. They say that the PS5 Pro will come with a new GPU codenamed Viola, fabricated on TSMC's N4P process node. The GPU will feature nearly double the number of WGPs found on the outgoing PS5, with 30 in total, and will come with AMD's latest RDNA 3 architecture.
But, this won't be your typical RDNA 3 GPU. The leak also reports that this new Viola GPU will come with ray-tracing improvements derived from AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 GPU architecture. These features will include ray tracing hardware acceleration for things such as BVH traversal (which run via shaders on the outgoing PS5), as well as a new thread reordering technique to boost RT performance, similar to Nvidia's Shader Execution Reordering feature, found in its RTX 40 series GPUs.
The leak also states that the new PS5 Pro will come with AMD's latest XDNA2 neural processing unit for accelerating AI workloads. Specifically, it will be integrated for image upscaling purposes, utilizing a bespoke temporal machine learning upscaling technique made by Sony. Apparently, Sony wants to duplicate what Nvidia and Intel are doing with their DLSS and XeSS technologies, by upscaling with AI which can offer higher image quality over "non-AI" image upscaling techniques such as FSR.
The last major upgrade reportedly coming to the PS5 Pro is a slightly faster Zen 2 CPU, clocked at 4.4 GHz. That wouldn't be a massive upgrade, but it is better than nothing.
