A wave of rumors has engulfed Sony’s premiere fish tail-shaped console, with speculation centering on an upcoming PS5 Pro next year with a beefed-up CPU and GPU supposed to help it swim above any of the other prominent consoles currently on the market.
An anonymous user on the ResetEra forums and more folks on Twitter claimed the PS5 Pro is internally dubbed Project “Viola.” The upcoming console would still use the same AMD Zen2 CPU, but it’s been overclocked to 4.4 GHz compared to 3.5 GHz. The more dramatic change is on the GPU side, where the APU gets access to the AMD RDNA3 architecture. More specifically, it’s primarily RDNA3 but getting access to the accelerated ray tracing from RDNA4. WCCFTech first reported on the new slew of details for the upcoming console update.
Your mileage will—and should—vary on how accurate any of these rumors are, but they do come during an interesting time. InsiderGaming’s Tom Henderson, who first dropped rumors of the PS5 Slim, tweeted Monday that Sony is already anticipating that these specs have leaked since the company handed out development kits to third-party developers. The rumors claim there’s a Sept. 2024 reveal planned for a full release sometime later in the year, likely in November.
The so-called “trinity” of design philosophy on this supposed PS5 Pro is centered on ray tracing enhancements, fast storage, and upscaling. The upscaling improvements are due to AMD’s XDNA2 AI core, which the company revealed last week. The rumors point to the PS5 maintaining the same 15GB of G6 memory, but it will receive a boost in speed from 14 to 18 Gbps.
All that is to say, if the specs rumors are true, the PS5 Pro could be a marginal improvement over the three-year-old console, enough to make it a fair deal more powerful than the Xbox Series X. Accelerated ray tracing improvements sure are nice, and it may be able to support higher frame rates at 4K. We still don’t know specifics about the upcoming console’s GPU clock, its storage capacity, or—most importantly—its price.
If you’ve got one of the new, slimmer PlayStation 5 under the Christmas tree, you’re already getting a little bit more internal storage space along with the skinnier frame—1 TB compared to 825 GB, to be specific. There’s no mention in the rumors of how many terabytes the Pro model will have, but it would be very nice to see a bump from 1.5 TB to 2 TB, considering just how big modern games have become. Sony released the PlayStation 4 Pro in 2016 at the same time as the PlayStation 4 Slim, featuring better CPU and GPU performance over the original console.
It also expanded base storage options from 500 GB to a standard 1 TB HDD and added support for up to 4K resolutions. Hell, while we’re at it, maybe Sony can change the overall design of the PS5 so it’s not such a pain to lay it down horizontally.
The supposed “Viola” model would be by far the more powerful of the consoles available between Microsoft and Sony. Still, it’s an open question whether Microsoft will follow suit on any mid-gen console refresh.
Internal files point to Xbox working on two updated Xbox Series S models called “Sebile” and “Ellewood” that would update the device’s storage and WiFi capabilities. Still, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, told Eurogamer earlier this year that there’s always the problem that consoles will lag behind the latest specs simply because of their long development cycles.
So perhaps Microsoft has cooled off on trying to match the latest hardware, especially when Spencer recently said the company is spending more than $1 billion a year supporting third-party games on Game Pass. Xbox’s CFO Tim Stuart openly talked about sticking Game Pass on every platform under the sun, including Nintendo’s and Sony’s consoles.
