The PS5 Pro is reportedly coming this holiday season
The past week has seen a big geyser of leaks springing up around the PlayStation 5 Pro, a long-awaited console upgrade.
Following in the steps of the PS4 generation, Sony is widely expected to release a PS5 Pro with upgraded power and capabilities sometime soon, but reports in the past week suggest that it'll actually arrive this holiday season.
The main source of all this chatter is serial leak-reporter Tom Henderson on his site Insider Gaming.
Advert
The leaks suggest that the PS5 Pro will ship with the same CPU or processor as the PS5, but it will reportedly have a 'High CPU Frequency Mode', helping it clock up 10% faster speeds than the standard console.
The graphical side of things could show a huge gulf - the PS5 Pro's GPU (which processes its graphics) will push out 33.5 Teraflops of power, which is around three times the amount managed by the basic PS5.
This performance boost will apparently be particularly noticeable where ray-traced lighting and reflections are concerned, and there will also be a major arrival with it in the form of PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling).
This system will let the PS5 Pro scale its resolution up to higher points, and should make for crisper rendering and even the possibility of 8K output for those who have a screen that supports it.
The latest report suggests that the PS5 Pro will also have upgraded memory that will run around 28% faster, again opening up more possibilities for game developers.
With an apparent release date later in 2024, things are looking very interesting for PlayStation fans, then, but there's one huge omission in all of these leaks and reports - pricing.
It's hard to predict whether details about that side of things will follow, but there's no hint yet - and it'll be a huge variable.
After all, while the new slimmer PS5 is getting occasional discounts, we haven't seen much of a price cut on the console so far, and if the base version still costs around $450, then it's hard to imagine the PS5 Pro coming in much under the $600 or $550 point.
That's an awful lot of cash for a console, especially when the basic PS5 will still be there, and will be able to play all the same games (unless there's a surprising twist on that front).
So, assuming the PS5 Pro is both real and coming this year, it's easy to imagine that execs at PlayStation are sweating over pricing right about now - not least because it looks like the next Nintendo Switch won't arrive until 2025, giving the PS5 Pro a clean run at the market.