The online rumor mill around the existence of a potential Pro version of the PlayStation 5 has turned a little more with the release of some unsubstantiated information at this stage but may have some basis in reality.
A user called RandomlyRandom67 released a list of specs on the videogame discussion forum ReseEra going into a good deal of technical detail around what we might be getting in a console that we, as yet, have no definitive proof even exists. That’s the rumor mill for you. Take it all with a liberal pinch of salt.
One of the key points for those who don’t understand all the tech aspects of things is the reveal slated for September 2024, so we can expect plenty of other rumors in the next nine months if that is the case.
PS5 Pro rumored specs
The key points of the ResetEra post are below:
Existing information
- In July 2023, Tom Henderson reported that the PS5 Pro, “codenamed” Trinity, is currently in development. According to him it has 30WGPs, 18 gbps GDDR6, and is targeting a Nov 2024 release date. He also mentioned it has “accelerated ray tracing.”
- Reliable hardware leaker “Kepler_L2” reported in July that AMD’s codename for the SoC is “Viola.”
- Both Trinity and Viola codenames follow the existing Shakespearean inspiration for codenames surrounding the latest Sony consoles. Viola is the protagonist in the Shakespeare play Twelfth Night, and Trinity references the Holy Trinity Church (Stratford-upon-Avon) where Shakespeare was baptized, married, and buried.
New information:
- Viola is fabbed on TSMC N4P.
- GFX1115
- Viola’s CPU is maintaining the zen2 architecture found in the existing PS5 for compatibility, but the frequency will once again be dynamic with a peak of 4.4GHz. 64 KB of L1 cache per core, 512 KB of L2 cache per core, and 8 MB of L3 shared (4 MB per CCX).
- Viola’s die is 30WGPs when fully enabled, but it will only have 28WGPs (56 CUs) enabled for the silicon in retail PS5 Pro units.
- Trinity 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.
- 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. It will also include thread reordering to reduce data and execution divergence, something akin to Ada Lovelace SER and Intel Arc’s TSU.
- 3584 shaders, 224 TMUs, and 96 ROPs.
- 16GB of 18 gbps GDDR6. 256-bit memory bus with 576 GB/s memory bandwidth.
- The GPU frequency target is 2.0 GHz. This lands the dual-issue TFLOPs in the range of 28.67 TFLOPs peak (224 (TMUs) * 2 (operations, dual issue) * 2 (core clock)). 14.33 TFLOPs if we ignore the dual-issue factor.
- 50-60% rasterization uplift over Oberon and Oberon Plus, over twice the raw RT performance.
- XDNA2 NPU will be featured for the purpose of accelerating Sony’s bespoke temporal machine learning upscaling technique. This will be one of the core focuses of the PS5 Pro, like we saw with checkboard rendering for the PS4 Pro. Temporally stable upscaled 4K output at higher than 30 FPS is the goal.
- September 2024 reveal
So is any of it true?
Time will tell if any of this is actually true and if it turns out to be incorrect, everybody will have forgotten by then, but there is technical evidence here to suggest the GPU spec would fall just under that of a 7800XT, according to those in the know.
It is worth reading through the comments of the threads to see follow-up speculation and ideas on where Sony could be taking a potentially revamped PS5.
