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Hello and welcome to our live coverage of today's PlayStation 5 Technical Presentation, otherwise known as the likely reveal of the PS5 Pro console.
Wherever you are in the world, we're only a matter of a few hours away from the presentation with PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny, where we'll likely see a shiny new hardware member of the PlayStation family revealed at 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm BST.
I'm here to provide a rundown of what we can expect, what we're hoping for, all the best rumors and details that have surfaced so far, and more. Let's get into it!
We've been following news and rumors of the PS5 Pro for months and months now, both as gaming tech journalists and editors, but also just as fans - there's nothing quite like a new console. And now we're only 90 minutes away from the potential announcement of a brand-new one!
Given the PS4 Pro's very existence, but also its success as a mid-generation upgrade, almost as soon as we were out of the woods of the PS5's launch, murmurings of mid-gen 'Pro' console started to bubble up in the fanbase and industry.
However, it's mainly been in the past year or so that the rumors and leaks started ramping up; here's a quick look at how we got to where we are today.
Going back two years or so, one of the earliest reports on a potential PS5 Pro was that it could launch somewhere in early to mid-2024. That report came from RedGamingTech's Paul Eccleston. Back in 2022, Eccleston stated that the PS5 Pro would bring “some significant improvements over the base system.”
Furthermore, he added that the console “is possibly targeting sometime in late 2023 or sometime in 2024” for a release date. It's now late 2024 and we're expecting the PS5 Pro to be revealed at today's PlayStation 5 Technical Presentation.
After a period of quietness, we started to a gathering of pace of PS5 Pro rumors. Back in March of this year, some alleged PS5 Pro specs leaked online. Some more obvious wins were highlighted, including PS5 titles being able to "support higher resolution and frame rate."
However, more specifically, the leaked documents note that the PS5 Pro is estimated to be "about 45% faster than standard PlayStation 5" when it comes to rendering power. This could have a huge benefit to games that make use of ray tracing, for example, including Cyberpunk 2077. This number would be quite the jump for any PS5 game, right?
In April of this year, we got some more reported information on the graphics card of the PS5 Pro, with Tom Warren of The Verge stating that the biggest changes in any potential PS5 Pro would focus on its GPU. He claimed that the PS5 Pro's GPU would “target [a] 3.85GHz [clock speed] (10% more than PS5) in a new ‘high frequency CPU mode’”. It would also offer a separate “3.5 GHz standard mode” that matches the specification of the base PS5 and allow developers to pick a mode for their games.
There was a repeat of the 45% increase in power, which itself wasn't new - but it was all starting to add up given multiple sources were starting to claim the same thing...