Report: PS5 Pro specs leak reveals big GPU bump, faster RAM, CPU and more

18.03.2024 - 18:33 / thesixthaxis.com / Tom Henderson / Pro

The PlayStation 5 Pro specs have potentially leaked, by way of Tom Henderson and Inside Gaming, giving more credence to previous rumours and reported that the PS5 Pro is coming out in 2024.

The PS5 Pro will follow in the footsteps of the PS4 Pro in offering a general spec bump when compared to the base PS5, aiming to give a general uplift to both performance and game fidelity. Per Henderson’s reporting, there will be a 28% boost in system memory speed, a 10% increase in CPU speed, and then a huge jump in GPU speed by some 45% with custom hardware dedicated to image upscaling.

On the CPU side of things, this will be achieved with a High CPU Frequency Mode which allows it to hit 3.85Ghz, though this will be done by way of the dynamic power management that balances CPU and GPU power to reach the same power consumption. When in higher CPU modes, the GPU will be downclocked by 1.5%.

The system memory will jump from 448 GB/s to 576GB/s throughput, though newer memory types could see that figure jump further. Faster memory can have a big impact on the GPU performance, though it may be a bit disappointing that there’s no increase in memory from 16GB, which could potentially constrain the use of some more advanced ray tracing and other techniques.

There’s also a higher clock speed for the audio processing, which will allow for more complex reverbs to be processed with 35% more performance.

And then there’s the GPU (and where things maybe get a little bit murky). Inside Gaming reports a 45% increase in speed with 33.5 Teraflops, which would peg this as being roughly equivalent to the Radeon RX 7700 XT – the original PS5 is closest to the previous generation Radeon RX 6700, without the XT. With the newer architecture will come a 2-3x ray-tracing performance improvement, though this will still be a good few steps behind what Nvidia has cooked up for their GeForce GPU series – it could be roughly equivalent to the last generation GeForce RTX 3070.

The secret sauce will be in Sony’s custom PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling) upscaling/antialiasing solution, looking to replace the hardware agnostic FSR 2 with something custom and more advanced for higher quality upscaling. This will be a custom machine learning architecture and “AI accelerator” that supports 300 TOPS of 8 bit computation / 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point in its own right.

At a fundamental level, this improved GPU should allow the PS5 Pro to run those games at higher resolutions and with better performance. While the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S were announced as 4K consoles (similar to the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X), the emergence of temporal upscaling has allowed developers to lean on this alongside dynamic resolutions. There’s many a 60fps