We return to talk about PS5 Pro thanks to new rumors that outline in detail the possible specifications of the intergenerational model of the Sony console – presumed codename Trinity – apparently destined to raise the bar of power considerably compared to PS5. And that’s largely thanks to a hybrid GPU based on both RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 architecture. The rumors are in addition to those reported in July by Tom Henderson who talked about 18 Gbps memory, a 30 WGP GPU and accelerated ray tracing.
Also in July, the well-known leaker Kepler had also expressed himself about the new PS5 Pro talking about an upgrade limited to the CPU and the name of the SoC, apparently called Purple, which is confirmed in the new rumors published on the ResetEra forum. But this time the information is much more detailed.
According to user RandomlyRandom67, the Viola SoC is made with the TSMC N4P 5-nanometer manufacturing process and equips a Zen 2-type CPU with a dynamic frequency like that of the PS5 – although pushed to a higher clock with a boost of 4.4 GHz – for compatibility reasons.
Instead, there is talk of a net change for the RDNA 3 GPU GFX1115 with 3584 shaders, 224 TMUs, 96 ROPs and 30 WPGs of which 28 are active. As a result, the compute units actually used, two for each WGP, would be 56 against the 36 of the PS5 GPU. But according to Kepler’s report on X, the Viola SoC should actually use 30 WGP and therefore 60 compute units. All with 16 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR 6 memory with 256-bit bus and 576 GB/s of bandwidth.
The other important news for the PS5 Pro GPU concerns the possible use of hardware for ray tracing based on RDNA 4 architecture, also exploited to accelerate the BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) process. In addition, still talking about the graphics unit, there could also be a novelty for the management of threads similar to the SER (Shader Execution Reordering) of the Nvidia Lovelace GPUs and the TSU (Thread Sorting Unit) of the Intel Arc ones.
All this is a function of a performance increase that should reach 14.33 TFLOPs in double-precision calculation against the PS5’s peak 10.28 TFLOPs. There’s also talk of a 50-60% increase in raster capabilities and more than doubled ray tracing performance. Finally, the rumors refer to the use of an XDNA2 neural computing unit to accelerate Sony’s AI-based upscaling, an apparently very relevant component in the ecosystem of the new model which is reportedly designed for 4K gaming at over 30 FPS and will be announced in September 2024.
