The mid-gen PlayStation 5 upgrade will be announced in the coming weeks, it’s claimed.
Dealabs user billbil-kun, who has a lengthy track record for leaking upcoming games and hardware, says the new console will be called PS5 Pro.
They say it will be announced “very soon” with the official announcement set to be made during the first half of September.
They also claimed to have access to the packaging design for the PS5 Pro, but because they can’t share copyrighted images they have instead drawn a sketch of the design.
According to the illustration, the console’s design will look similar to the PS5 Slim, and will still be coloured white.
The main difference is the addition of three black stripes across the middle of the console, differentiating it from other PS5 models.
The report also suggests that the PS5 Pro appears to be slightly thicker than the PS5 Slim, but suggests that the design of the faceplates means it may still be compatible with existing PS5 Slim faceplates.
One thing billbil-kun cannot yet confirm is whether the PS5 Pro will have a disc drive, because the image they have received shows a PS5 Pro without one.
It’s not clear, therefore, whether there will be two models of the PS5 Pro – one with a disc drive and one without one – or whether it will be a single digital-only edition with the option for players to buy a disc drive separately (as is the case for the digital-only PS5 Slim).
One theory offered by billbil-kun is that the console may ship without a disc drive in order to keep costs lower.
The report also says the PS5 Pro will come with the same standard white DualSense controller that already comes with the original and slim PS5 models.
Speculation has mounted for some time about the internal specifications of the PS5 Pro, something billbil-kun’s report sheds no new light on.
In April, YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead leaked official Sony documentation explaining the console’s specifications, taken from Sony Interactive Entertainment‘s Developer Network.
The document was verified by other sites including IGN, and was then taken down by a Sony copyright strike, lending further credibility to its authenticity.
The video suggested that the PS5 Pro’s CPU will be identical to that of the standard PS5, but that the new console will have a ‘High CPU Frequency Mode’ which increases the CPU by 10% to 3.85GHz, but reduces GPU performance by around 1% as a result.
The GPU itself will be powered by 33.5 teraflops versus the PS5’s 10.28 teraflops, but this doesn’t mean it will be more than three times as powerful.
As The Verge noted at the time, changes in AMD’s architecture means it’s difficult to directly compare teraflops directly between PS5 and PS5 Pro, and that in reality the comparison is more like 10.28 versus around 17 teraflops (indeed, the documentation leaked by Moore’s Law is Dead suggests “rendering is about 45% faster”).