As we have said several times over the last few months, Sony is putting the finishing touches on a new version of the PlayStation 5, which is now much more focused on performance and not on being lighter, simpler and/or compact.
We are talking about the PlayStation 5 Pro, a console that should hit the market to ensure that it is capable of playing anything and everything at 4K above 30FPS. What does it means?
PlayStation 5 Pro: The magic is in the GPU!
Photo is a reimagining of the console by Technizo Concept. Not the final design
Therefore, as we reported yesterday, it was 99% confirmed that Sony would launch a PS5 Pro in 2024 as soon as rumors surrounding the PS5 Slim began to gain strength. After all, the sources were exactly the same, and if one story was true, so would the other.
That said, the PS5 Pro hardware will focus on graphical power, trying to offer 4K gameplay above 30 FPS in each and every game. A clear improvement compared to what the PS5 and Xbox Series (New generation consoles always offer a “dynamic” resolution, that is, the resolution changes depending on the demands of the environment in which the player is).
How is this done?
Apparently, the SoC that will serve as the basis for the PS5 Pro is quite different from the current “Oberon” and “Oberon Plus” of the PlayStation 5, as it appears with the name “Viola”.
What is the Viola SoC? It’s a mix of what made the PS5 special, with the new graphics technologies on the market!
After all, this SoC features the same 8 Zen 2 cores capable of offering 16 threads, now with significantly higher frequencies. So, the big difference is in the GPU, which in addition to more cores, with higher frequencies… Everything is now based on an RDNA 3 architecture with touches from RDNA 4.
More specifically, we have a GPU with 30 WGPs, which in turn means 60 computing units or 3840 stream processors. In addition, we also have 120 AI accelerators, 60 Ray-Tracing accelerators, among many other things.
Note: All of this supports all new frame generation and resolution upscaling technologies. The magic is here!
Interestingly, in addition to the GPU, Sony will also focus on the amount of memory and its speed! With some rumors of 2GB reserved solely for the operating system, while we still have 16GB of GDDR6 memory at 18Gbps for games.
As we said yesterday, the price will obviously be higher than that of the current PS5. How much? I would say between €700 and €800. When? October or November 2024. The question now is… Would I pay €800 for a slightly more powerful PS5, when a hypothetical PS6 is 3~4 years away?