Today, Sony Interactive Entertainment expands the PlayStation 5 (PS5) family of products with the release of the new PlayStation 5 Pro (PS5 Pro) console - the company's most advanced and innovative gaming console to date. PlayStation 5 Pro was designed with deeply engaged players and game creators in mind and includes key performance features that allow games to run with higher fidelity graphics at smoother frame rates.

"With PlayStation 5 Pro, we wanted to make sure that the most dedicated gamers, as well as game creators, could utilize the most advanced console technology, taking the PlayStation 5 experience even farther," said Hideaki Nishino, CEO Platform Business Group, Sony Interactive Entertainment. "This is our most advanced PlayStation to date, and it gives our community of players the opportunity to experience games the way that developers intended for them to be. Players will be thrilled with how this console enhances some of their favorite titles, while opening avenues to discover new ones."

Many gamers have been skeptical of the recently announced Sony PS5 Pro since the day it was announced, largely due to the high price and the perceived lack of meaningful improvements. It seemed to many as though the PS5 Pro was simply a meaningless mid-cycle cash-grab with a few extra features tacked onto the top, however, it looks like Sony and its development partners have put in the work to make the PS5 Pro experience fresh and worthwhile. According to a new post on the official PlayStation Blog, the new console will launch with at least 50 confirmed "Enhanced" games.

What exactly Sony means by Enhanced is rather nebulous, since many of the Enhanced games for the PS5 Pro have a mishmash of different Pro features. For example, Resident Evil Village gets the full 120 FPS treatment, while Horizon Forbidden West only gets a bump up to 4K at 60 FPS. Stellar Blade, on the other hand, only gets an FPS boost to 80 FPS or 50 FPS at 4K. It's likely that, like Stellar Blade, all the titles aiming for higher refresh rates on the PS5 Pro are using some mix of PSSR, dedicated AI acceleration, and traditional rasterization rendering techniques to achieve the increased frame rates. Both The Last of Us Part I and The Last of Us II Remastered will run at 60 FPS on the PS5 Pro, but they will render at 1440p and use PSSR to upscale to 4K output.

Electronic Arts Inc. and BioWare announced today that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is now available for PlayStation 5 (also enhanced for PS5 Pro), Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam (Steam Deck Verified), EA app and Epic Games Store. This bold, heroic adventure is built to deliver on what the series is best known for: rich storytelling, fantasy worldbuilding, companions & fellowship, and a world where you matter. The next installment in BioWare's beloved franchise has captivated critics worldwide, with outlets such as IGN and GamesRadar+ proclaiming it "deserves its place in the RPG pantheon" and is "A true return to RPG form for BioWare" in their 9/10 and 4.5/5 reviews.

In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Solas, the Dread Wolf, wants to tear down the Veil that separates Thedas from the world of demons, restoring his people's immortality and glory - even at the cost of countless lives. But his ritual goes awry, and his worst fears are realized, as two of his most ancient and powerful adversaries are released. Players will step into the role of Rook, a fully-customizable protagonist who must rise up and unite their companions to stop these two powerful deities on a journey that will span across Thedas' bustling cities, lush tropics, boreal forests, fettered swamps and deepest depths.

As we continue our celebrations leading up to the 30th anniversary of the first PlayStation console launch, we have a special treat to reveal today that brings the past together with the present. Introducing our PlayStation 30th Anniversary Collection to celebrate this wonderful milestone.

The new limited edition designs pay homage to 30 wonderful years of gaming, a journey made possible by the passion and support of our fans and talented game developers. Reminiscent of the very first PlayStation console to launch on December 3, 1994, this limited edition offering utilizes the original PlayStation color design and integrates it into the latest line of PS5 hardware products.

The $699.99 MSRP of the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro is a source of outrage on social media, but what if we told you that the new premium console is in fact cheaper than what the PlayStation 3 cost at launch for even its cheapest variant? Sony launched the PlayStation 3 in 2006, with its cheapest variant that came with a 20 GB hard drive, at $499, in the US. A premium variant with a 60 GB HDD cost $599. Both models included a Blu-ray drive, as physical media was the prevalent mode of game distribution. In comes inflation. $599 in 2006 money is approximately $930 in today's money, while $499 (2006) in today's money is approximately $780.

Even the cheapest variant of the PlayStation 3 cost 11% more at launch than the PlayStation 5 Pro, adjusted by inflation, while the premium variant cost 24% more. The PlayStation 5 Pro is digital-only, and lacks an optical drive, which can be purchased separately for $80. Adding this cost, the PS5 Pro with a separately purchased optical drive costs exactly as much as the base model PlayStation 3 with 20 GB HDD did, back in 2006, adjusted by inflation.

Over the last four years since the launch of PS5, we've worked hard to continuously evolve the console experience and deliver the great games our players expect from us. Today, I'm incredibly proud to announce the next step in that evolution and welcome PlayStation 5 Pro to the PlayStation family - our most advanced and innovative console hardware to date.

We developed PS5 Pro with deeply engaged players and game creators in mind - as many have asked for a console that runs even higher fidelity graphics with smoother frame rates at 60 FPS. We achieved this on PS5 Pro with several key performance features.

• Upgraded GPU: With PS5 Pro, we are upgrading to a GPU that has 67% more Compute Units than the current PS5 console and 28% faster memory. Overall, this enables up to 45% faster rendering for gameplay, making the experience much smoother.
• Advanced Ray Tracing: We've added even more powerful ray tracing that provides more dynamic reflection and refraction of light. This allows the rays to be cast at double, and at times triple, the speeds of the current PS5 console.
• AI-Driven Upscaling: We're also introducing PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, an AI-driven upscaling that uses a machine learning-based technology to provide super sharp image clarity by adding an extraordinary amount of detail.

Sony is widely expected to announce its new premium PlayStation 5 Pro game console later today. The PlayStation Twitter handle posted that a PlayStation 5 technical presentation hosted by Mark Cerny (PlayStation systems lead architect) would stream later today, without specifying PlayStation 5 Pro. The announcement stream will be rather brisk, spanning only 9 minutes, but it seems enough for Cerny to provide a detailed rundown of what to expect from the PS5 Pro, since this is a premium variant of the existing PS5 generation, and not a "PlayStation 6." The PlayStation 5 Pro is being designed to offer 4K Ultra HD gameplay at native, or near-native resolution, with added eye-candy, thanks to its significantly updated graphics processor.

This could very well be what the elusive new PlayStation 5 console looks like. DeaLabs illustrated its design as part of its article compiling all rumored tech specs of the console. The console's body retains the essential design of the digital-only variant of PlayStation 5, and its refresh. The disc variant of PlayStation 5 has a crease accent running along its side panels, toward the top one-quarter. The PS5 Pro possibly has more crease accents in its place, possibly even serving as a set of air vents. This is only a 2-color illustration, which means the console could have a unique body color scheme, too.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is being designed for a nearly 2-3 times performance uplift over the original PlayStation 5, and its 6 nm mid-lifecycle refresh. AMD remains the SoC supplier for the PS5 Pro, and its chip is codenamed "Viola." This chip could be built on a more advanced foundry node than even the 6 nm "Oberon Plus" powering the PS5 (refresh). It is a semi-custom chip in the true sense, as it has a unique mix of AMD IP blocks from several generations.

We've known since May that AMD is giving its next generation RDNA 4 graphics architecture a significant upgrade with ray tracing performance, and had some clue since then, that the company is working on putting more of the ray tracing workflow through dedicated, fixed function hardware, unburdening the shader engine further. Kepler_L2, a reliable source with GPU leaks sheds light on some of the many new hardware features AMD is introducing with RDNA 4 to better accelerate ray tracing, which should give its GPUs a reduced performance cost of having ray tracing enabled. Kepler_L2 believes that these hardware features should also make it to the GPU of the upcoming Sony PlayStation 5 Pro.

To begin with, the RDNA 4 ray accelerator introduces the new Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine, which should at least mean a 100% ray intersection performance increase over RDNA 3, which in turn offered a 50% increase over that of RDNA 2. The new RT instance node transform instruction should improve the way the ray accelerators handle geometry. Some of the other features we have trouble describing include a 64-byte RT node, ray tracing tri-pair optimization, Change flags encoded in barycentrics to simplify detection of procedural nodes; improved BVH footprint (possibly memory footprint): and RT support for oriented bounding box and instance node intersection. AMD is expected to debut Radeon RX series gaming GPUs based on RDNA 4 in early 2025.

Thanks for the detailed information obtained by The Verge, today we confirm previously leaked details as Sony gears up to unveil the highly anticipated PlayStation 5 Pro, codenamed "Trinity." According to insider reports, Sony is urging developers to optimize their games for the PS5 Pro, with a primary focus on enhancing ray tracing capabilities. The console is expected to feature an RDNA 3 GPU with 30 WGP running BVH8, capable of 33.5 TeraFLOPS of FP32 single-precision computing power, and a slightly quicker CPU running at 3.85 GHz, enabling it to render games with ray tracing enabled or achieve higher resolutions and frame rates in select titles. Sony anticipates GPU rendering on the PS5 Pro to be approximately 45 percent faster than the standard PlayStation 5. The PS5 Pro GPU will be larger and utilize faster system memory to bolster ray tracing performance, boasting up to three times the speed of the regular PS5.

Additionally, the console will employ a more powerful ray tracing architecture, backed by PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), allowing developers to leverage graphics features like ray tracing more extensively. To support this endeavor, Sony is providing developers with test kits, and all games submitted for certification from August onward must be compatible with the PS5 Pro. Insider Gaming, the first to report the full PS5 Pro specs, suggests a potential release during the 2024 holiday period. The PS5 Pro will also feature modifications for developers regarding system memory, with Sony increasing the memory bandwidth from 448 GB/s to 576 GB/s, enhancing efficiency for an even more immersive gaming experience. To do AI processing, there is an custom AI accelerator capable of 300 8-bit INT8 TOPS and 67 16-bit FP16 TeraFLOPS, in addition to ACV audio codec running up to 35% faster.

The recent PlayStation 5 Pro specification leak has caused quite a stir—even games development studios were surprised by some of these details. Chris Dring (Head of GamesIndustry.biz) attended last week's GDC industry event, where he met many developers who "did not understand the point" of Sony's upcoming mid-generation console refresh. The most hardcore segment of the current PS5 userbase will likely enthusiastically embrace a more powerful variant, but Dring's observations indicate that development studios are not expressing as much excitement—over a refreshed model—as the gaming community. This topic was discussed during yesterday's GamesIndustry.biz Microcast—industry figures believe that the base PlayStation 5 model's full potential remains untapped.

This mirrors a debate over a possible upgraded Xbox Series variant—gaming fans have complained about restrictive 30 FPS performance, even on the more potent Series X console; but experts believe that developers need to spend more time optimizing their software or produce "truly next-gen" experiences. Dring's sources expressed doubt about the PS5 Pro's predicted ability to "grow the market" or "move the needle"—ultimately, Sony will make some more money and gain headline coverage post-launch. The refreshed variant is expected to reach retail later this year, but industry watchdogs reckon that momentum will be lost due to the absence of a system-selling title around launch time. Grand Theft Auto VI would be the ideal "killer app," but insider murmurs posit a delay into 2026.

Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson believes that Sony PlayStation leadership will tighten up development conditions, following recent leaks pertaining to the technological underpinnings of the heavily rumored "PS5 Pro" home console. An IGN report and another Henderson-authored article posit that last week's revelations are "legit," according to their respective networks of industry moles. Apparently top secret information was extracted from a technical document—reports suggest that Sony sent this paper to its third-party development partners, alongside a new batch of development kits.

Industry experts think that (slated) repercussions could affect smaller development houses—Henderson tweeted: "as expected, Sony has launched an internal investigation into the leaked documents on Trinity as it leaked during a third-party rollout...Not sure on the implications yet as I don't think they can catch one individual, but Sony could reduce its third-party developer pool for new tech as a result." Rumors of a "mid-gen hardware refresh" have been swirling for almost a year and a half, but PlayStation bosses seem to be rattled into action (this week). Microsoft maintained a cool exterior following the leak of next-gen Xbox details, but that information emerged from unredacted court documents. Phil Spencer and his colleagues claim that future Xbox product roadmaps are in constant flux.

Sony is preparing to launch its next-generation PlayStation 5 Pro console in the Fall of 2024, right around the holidays. We previously covered a few graphics details about the console. However, today, we get more details about the CPU and the overall system, thanks to the exclusive information from Insider Gaming. Starting off, the sources indicate that PS5 Pro system memory will get a 28% bump in bandwidth, where the standard PS5 console had 448 GB/s, and the upgraded PS5 Pro will get 576 GB/s. Apparently, the memory system is more efficient, likely coming from an upgrade in memory from the GDDR6 SDRAM of the regular PS5. The next upgrade is the CPU, which has special modes for the main processor. The CPU uArch is likely the same, with clocks pushed to 3.85 GHz, resulting in a 10% frequency increase.

However, this is only achieved in the "High CPU Frequency Mode," which steals the SoC's power from the GPU and downclocks it slightly to allocate more power to the CPU in highly CPU-intense settings. The GPU we discussed here is an RDNA 3 IP with up to 45% faster graphics rendering. The ray tracing performance can be up to four times higher than the regular PS5, while the entire GPU delivers 33.5 TeraFLOPS of FP32 single-precision computing. This comes from 30 WGP running BVH8 shaders vs the 18 WGPs running BVH4 shaders on the regular PS5. There are PSSR upscalers present, and the GPU can output 8K resolution, which will come with future software updates. Last but not least, the AI front also has a custom AI accelerator capable of 300 8-bit INT8 TOPS and 67 16-bit FP16 TeraFLOPS. Audio codecs are getting some love, as well, with ACV running up to 35% faster.

Sony is giving final touches to a first-party super-resolution technology called PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), according to a sensational new leak by Moore's Law is Dead. The company plans to debut the tech with the new PlayStation 5 Pro console, this November. The tech is unlikely to make it to the current PlayStation 5 console due to the underlying graphics architecture. PSSR, from the looks of it, is closer in function to NVIDIA DLSS than it is to AMD FSR. The tech leverages the over 300 TOPS of AI inferencing power of the RDNA 3 GPU powering the PS5 Pro, to drive an AI-based reconstruction algorithm. The RDNA 2-based GPU of the current PS5 lacks AI accelerators. The biggest driving force behind the PSSR development isn't just this AI-based upscaling tech, but the impact of upscaling tech on frame-times and whole-system latencies. PSSR apparently makes the PS5 Pro capable of being not just a 4K-class game console, but also one that's ready to take on 8K. Sony is, after all, a television company, and would want to create use-cases for its latest 8K televisions.

A lot is also being speculated about the GPU driving the PlayStation 5 Pro. We've known from several older leaks that it is based on AMD's latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture, but we're now learning that the GPU will be a mix-match of several current and future graphics architectures from AMD's IP bouquet. It could have more advanced media and display engines than the current Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, but even the shader engines could incorporate certain elements from a future architecture, such as RDNA 4. The report speaks of a total AI inferencing performance of 300 TOPS, an FP16 throughput 67 TFLOPs, and an FP32 throughput of 33.5 TFLOPs. To put these into perspective, the GPU driving the Xbox Series X is rated for 12 TFLOPs FP32.

Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based games consultancy Kantan Games was interviewed by CNBC earlier this week—he was invited on-air to provide expert commentary on Sony's freshly revised sales and revenue forecast for PlayStation 5 products. He believes that great forward momentum is best achieved with refreshed hardware, and a well timed launch coinciding with the release of AAA/blockbuster games titles. Last autumn's rollout of slimmer PlayStation 5 consoles was not particularly exciting—with no major bump up in specs or attractive pricing. The development of an inevitable "Pro" variant has circulated around rumor mills for more than a year.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and AMD are believed to co-operating on a very potent hardware redesign—reports from late last year posited that a semi-custom "Viola" SoC is in the pipeline. A more expensive RDNA 3-upgraded refresh could attract an additional segment of hardcore gamers, but another industry analyst reckons that Sony is unlikely to implement a standard model price cut later this year (based on past trends). George Jijiashvili, senior principal analyst at Omdia, stated: "A scenario where Sony launches a PS5 Pro, but still experiences declining year-on-year hardware sales is very much within the realms of possibility." Serkan Toto (of Kantan Games consultancy) expressed a more optimistic view: "There seems to be a broad consensus in the game industry that Sony is indeed preparing a launch of a PS5 Pro in the second half of 2024...And Sony will want to make sure to have a great piece of hardware ready when GTA VI hits in 2025, a launch that will be a shot in the arm for the entire gaming industry."

Sony is developing the PlayStation 5 Pro console that targets higher refresh-rate gaming at 4K Ultra HD, or higher in-game eye-candy, given its faster hardware. Details about the console are few and far between, given its late-2024 tentative release, but by now the company would have co-developed its semi-custom SoC, so it could spend the next year extensively testing and optimizing it, before mass production in the 2-3 quarters leading up to the launch. Kepler_L2 and Tom Henderson on Twitter are fairly reliable sources for PlayStation hardware leaks, and piecing their recent posts together, VideoCardz compiled the most probable specs of the SoC at the heart of the PlayStation 5 Pro.

The semi-custom SoC powering the PlayStation 5 Pro is co-developed by Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and AMD; and is codenamed "Viola." The monolithic chip is built on the TSMC N4P foundry node (4 nm EUV), which is a big upgrade from the 7 nm DUV node on which the "Oberon" SoC powering the original PlayStation 5, and 6 nm DUV node powering the "Oberon Plus" SoC of the refreshed PS5, are based on. Sony is leaving the CPU component largely untouched, it is an 8-core/16-thread unit based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, spread across two 4-core CCXs. The CPU has a maximum boost frequency of 4.40 GHz, dialed up from the 3.50 GHz maximum boost of "Oberon." The iGPU is where all the magic happens.