Yesterday, YouTuber Moore's Law Is Dead detailed the specifications of the PS5 Pro console in a new video. As our readers know all too well, Moore's Law Is Dead doesn't exactly have a perfect track record when it comes to hardware leaks, thus causing many to doubt the veracity of the leaked specs.
However, reputable gaming insider Tom Henderson has now confirmed with his sources that those PS5 Pro specifications are actually real. Let's recap them, then:
- Larger GPU with faster memory, providing 45% improved performance in rasterized rendering;
- Massively improved ray tracing architecture that should deliver 2-3x speedup over the regular PS5, with peaks of 4x;
- Custom machine learning architecture that supports 300 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) at 8-bit;
- The ML architecture was built to enable the so-called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technique. The leaked document describes it as Sony's version of Multi Frame Super Resolution based on the PlayStation Machine Learning (PSML) algorithm. According to the leaked info, PSSR currently supports up to 4K, but there are plans to add 8K support;
- PSSR is an ML-enhanced version of Temporal Anti-aliasing Upscaling (TAAU) that requires similar inputs to NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR and fully supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) pipelines. Moreover, no per-game training is required, just like with the latest version of DLSS. The document goes on to say PSSR requires just 250MB of the PS5 Pro's memory, with a current rendering cost of 2 milliseconds to upscale from Full HD to 4K, although optimization is still ongoing;
- The document also includes an image comparison with TAAU and AMD FSR 2, reportedly showing that PSSR offers superior image quality.
The big takeaway from all this PS5 Pro info is that while AMD has recently revealed it will release its own AI-based upscaling this year, it sounds like Sony has decided to do its own thing in this area.
In his report, Henderson said PS5 Pro devkits were shared with first-party PlayStation studios back in September 2023, while third-party developers got it in January 2024. This Spring, Sony will distribute devkits that are expected to be identical to the final hardware.
When might players get their hands on the console, though? Sony is said to still target Holiday 2024 for the launch window, but that might change due to the lack of any first-party games in this year's calendar. Still, even if a delay happens, Sony will want the PS5 Pro to be in the market by the time GTA VI launches in 2025.
