PlayStation 5 Pro updated specs appear online, sounds like most powerful console ever

It looks like we might have a sneak peak at what hardware and specs could be under the hood of the PlayStation 5 Pro console which is heavily rumoured to be announced next year. While none of these specs are confirmed by Sony, they do come from a recent AMD announcement, that could give us some idea of the upgrade. Of course, do take it all with a pinch of salt, for now.

What we’re seeing, in terms of an upgrade, here is a smaller leap forwards from PlayStation 5 to PlayStation 5 Pro, compared to what we saw last generation between PlayStation 4 and the Pro version of that console. It’s much harder to make large leaps in performance nowadays, compared to what we saw back in the day of PS3 to PS4. It’s much more incremental.

VIDEO

Some key points to look at from the AMD announcement are improvements to memory, ray tracing, and upscaling. As seen in these new details:

• Trinity (the PS5 Pro codename) is the culmination of three key technologies. Fast storage (hardware accelerated compression and decompression, already an existing key PS5 technology), accelerated ray tracing, and upscaling.
• 16GB of 18 gbps GDDR6. 256-bit memory bus with 576 GB/s memory bandwidth.
• Architecture is RDNA3, but it's taking ray tracing improvements from RDNA4. BVH traversal will be handled by dedicated RT hardware rather than fully relying on the shaders.

What this all means is that we will see a noticeable increase in performance in areas like ray tracing, quite likely taking the option of the newer ray pathing. The console will rely on hardware to produce those ray tracing improvements, rather than shaders. Plus, we’ll see more in the way of upscaling, which PC players have been experiencing for some time through AMD FidelityFX and NVIDIA DLSS.