Sony’s half-generation console refresh hasn’t even been officially announced yet, and we’re already hearing a lot about it, although two important factors are still not so concrete… but if things continue like this, we’ll hear those details in time.

Yesterday we reported some details about the PlayStation 5 Pro, but after the leak of an internal usage document (confirmed by Tom Henderson writing for Insider Gaming) we’re hearing more about the successor to the PlayStation 4 Pro (and published on the same site, which is encouraging in terms of credibility). This time it’s about the performance of the processor and system memory, and we hear a few things about the graphics chip.

The PlayStation 5 Pro’s processor will be the same as the base model (helping to support games, including backwards compatibility), but the boost clock will be 3.85GHz, 10% higher than the base PS5. System memory will be capable of 576GB/s instead of 448GB/s, a 28% improvement. Sound will also be improved as ACV will also run at a higher clock speed. According to Henderson, there will be 30 WGPs in the GPU running specialized BVH8 traversal shaders (the base PlayStation has 18 WGPs and BVH4 shaders).

According to AMD insider Kepler, the use of BVH8 is interesting because it confirms that the PlayStation 5 Pro is running the RDNA 4 ray tracing (RT) engine, and this architecture, capable of doubling RT per cycle, has not yet been mentioned in any open source patches. The focus is on RDNA 4: this is the architecture for AMD’s next generation of graphics cards! RDNA 3 was launched in December 2022, so we can expect to see the switch this year with the Radeon RX 8000 cards.

So Sony is focusing everything on ray tracing and AI with the PlayStation 5 Pro, which is rumored to be available from the end of the year. Just leak the price and release date, those are the important things!

Source: WCCFTech, Insider Gaming

BVH8 is interesting, not only confirms PS5 Pro is using RDNA4's RT engine but also confirms RDNA4 doubles RT throughput per cycle, something which hasn't been mentioned in any open source patch yet! 👀 https://t.co/dht9fDWF79

— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) March 17, 2024

Yes they're clearly going all in on RT and AI. But may end up a bit disappointing for people who just wanted higher FPS.

— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) March 17, 2024