PS5 Pro Was an Open Secret at Gamescom 2024

The existence of the PS5 Pro was long discussed throughout 2024 thanks to various leaks and rumors, but the latest State of Play that aired in late May didn’t feature any announcement for the new hardware. With Summer drawing to a close soon, some fans wondered whether the more powerful PlayStation 5 iteration had been delayed. However, at the Gamescom 2024 that’s being held this week in Cologne, developers started talking.

In a recent live stream, the Italian website Multiplayer mentioned that it had heard from a developer that they had delayed their game due to the upcoming launch of the PS5 Pro. I can confirm that I heard something similar during one of my appointments at Gamescom 2024.

Without even being prodded by me at all, a developer that I won’t name openly said they had received the specs of the PS5 Pro and were confident that Unreal Engine 5 would run much better on the new hardware compared to the regular PlayStation 5. Considering the circumstances revealed by Multiplayer, I’m positive this is not the same developer they talked to. Moreover, the studio I heard it from is not at all a big one, which makes it clear the hardware’s specifications and details are already in the hands of a large number of game makers.

As such, it is reasonable to assume an official announcement is near. Looking at the PS4 Pro, the console was announced on September 7, 2016, and subsequently launched on November 10. The same could happen again, as suggested by an industry analyst in late July.

While we wait for Sony to announce what the whole industry seems to know at this point, let’s recap the more credible leaks:

• 45% performance improvement in rasterized rendering thanks to a larger GPU and faster memory
• Hugely improved ray tracing architecture delivering 2-3x speedup on average, with peaks of 4x
• Custom machine learning architecture that supports 300 TOPS at 8-bit to power the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technique, Sony’s version of Multi Frame Super Resolution based on the PlayStation Machine Learning (PSML) algorithm.
• PSSR is an ML-enhanced version of Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling (TAAU) that requires inputs similar to NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR and fully supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) pipelines. It also does not require per-game training like the latest version of DLSS.