Watch Sony’s PS5 ‘technical presentation’ at 11AM ET

Updated Today, Sep 10, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and writing about the intersection of video games and sex.

Rumors of a PS5 Pro have swirled since earlier this year, with sources confirming to The Verge that developers are being asked to ensure their games are compatible with the improved system. On September 10th at 11AM ET, PlayStation is holding a “technical presentation” that appears set to confirm the console’s existence and souped-up specs, like a buffed GPU and faster CPU speeds.

The presentation will be hosted by PlayStation architect Mark Cerny and last a brisk nine minutes.

The rumor mill picked up steam last month with French tech site Dealabs claiming to have seen packaging for the Pro and sharing an illustration of what it supposedly looked like. Then, last week, Sony itself may have accidentally or on purpose shared what looked to be a PS5 Pro in its post celebrating 30 years of PlayStation history.

But now, Sony may put all those rumors to bed — stay tuned here for all of the updates, and you can watch the livestream below.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Sony is holding a PlayStation “Technical Presentation” tomorrow, just days after teasing a PS5 Pro console. The nine-minute stream will be hosted by Mark Cerny, the lead architect of the PS5 console. Cerny previously revealed the full PS5 specs ahead of its debut in 2020.

The stream will start at 8AM PT / 11AM ET / 4PM UK on September 10th and will be broadcast on the PlayStation YouTube channel. Sony hasn’t provided any further details about the technical presentation, but the announcement comes just after Sony teased the PS5 Pro in a 30th anniversary PlayStation image.

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Image: Sony

Sony has started celebrating 30 years of PlayStation and seems to have confirmed a PS5 Pro design leak in the process. A blog post earlier today included a 30th anniversary image (above), and eagle-eyed observers have spotted a suspicious-looking PS5 design in the montage that looks identical to the PS5 Pro leak from a week ago.

Dealabs reported last week that it had seen retail packaging for the PS5 Pro and created a sketch that showed three black stripes in the middle of the outer facades of the console. Those three black strips can be clearly seen in Sony’s montage image, looking rather Adidas-like and unlike the stripe you can find on the PS5. In fact, the existing PS5 model is also in the montage, with a single stripe through the middle.

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Is this the PS5 Pro?

We know the PS5 Pro is real and developers have been getting ready for it for months, but now Dealabs claims to have seen the packaging for the new console. It has created a sketch that shows it’s similar to the PS5 Slim, and this particular PS5 Pro model lacks a disc drive. An announcement is rumored for next month.

If you know anything about the PS5 Pro you can reach me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01
8K on the PlayStation 5 is no more.

If you want to be technical about it, 8K was never especially viable on the PS5 to begin with, but when the system launched in 2020 TV makers were heavily pushing 8K as the next big thing and Sony wanted to futureproof its pricey platform.

With a PS5 Pro coming soon, and likely supporting more robust 8K, removing 8K claims off the PS5 box isn’t a surprise.
We’ll sell 25 million PS5 consoles, no 21M, actually 20.8M.

It’s no secret that the PS5 has entered the “latter stage of its life cycle” with Sony resetting sales expectations in February. Today’s earnings report shows it just missing that revised 21M target by selling 20.8 million consoles for the fiscal year.

We’ll see if the rumored PS5 Pro helps change the trajectory before the year is done.

A downward trend.
Image: Sony
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Sony is working on a new “high-end version” of the PS5, codenamed Trinity and likely to debut as the PS5 Pro later this year. The Verge confirmed leaked specs about the PS5 Pro earlier this week, and we’ve also obtained details on how existing and new PS5 games can be “enhanced” to take advantage of the PS5 Pro hardware. Sony is also working on an ultra-boost mode for older games to make them run better on the PS5 Pro.

Sources familiar with Sony’s plans tell The Verge that Sony is asking developers to create a new PS5 Pro-exclusive graphics mode in games that combines Sony’s new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling to 4K resolution with a 60fps frame rate and ray-tracing effects. Insider Gaming first reported on some of these Enhanced PS5 Pro game details last month.

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In case you’re still wondering whether those PS5 Pro rumors were legit…

It’s pretty tough for a company to submit a copyright claim unless it owns the copyright!
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Sony is getting ready to release a more powerful PS5 console, possibly by the end of this year. After reports of leaked PS5 Pro specifications surfaced recently, The Verge has obtained a full list of specs for the upcoming console. Sources familiar with Sony’s plans tell me that developers are already being asked to ensure their games are compatible with this upcoming console, with a focus on improving ray tracing.

Codenamed Trinity, the PlayStation 5 Pro model will include a more powerful GPU and a slightly faster CPU mode. All of Sony’s changes point to a PS5 Pro that will be far more capable of rendering games with ray tracing enabled or hitting higher resolutions and frame rates in certain titles. Sony appears to be encouraging developers to use graphics features like ray tracing more with the PS5 Pro, with games able to use a “Trinity Enhanced” (PS5 Pro Enhanced) label if they “provide significant enhancements.”

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Go read Digital Foundry on the PS5 Pro.

The most trusted source for console analysis has just corroborated and analyzed the leaks.

“Those hoping that PS5 Pro will turn CPU-limited 30fps titles into super-smooth 60fps experiences will be disappointed,” writes Richard Leadbetter — but he thinks PS5 Pro “should be able to deliver a far higher perceptual increase in resolution vs PS5 than the PS4 Pro did against its junior variant.”

Lots more nuance here, including how PS5 Pro has 1.2GB more RAM for games:
More rumored specs for the PS5 Pro.

Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming reported GPU specifications and performance targets for a “PlayStation 5 Pro” on Friday, and now he says that just like the recently revised PS5, the Pro will also have a detachable disc drive.

Other new details include rumors of faster memory running at 576 GB/s (a 28 percent boost over the PS5), better audio performance, and a new “High CPU Frequency Mode” that boosts performance by 10 percent over the standard PS5.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Sony is reportedly working on a PlayStation 5 Pro model that may well include a far more powerful GPU that’s up to three times faster for certain tasks than the existing PS5 models. YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead claims to have gotten access to a technical overview document for the PS5 Pro, codenamed Trinity, and now Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming reports that the leaked specifications are accurate and the console is currently set to release during the holiday 2024 period.

Screenshots from the technical document include a mention of 67 teraflops of 16-bit floating point calculations, which works out to around 33.5 teraflops of single-precision compute. That reportedly works out to a 45 percent rendering performance improvement over the PS5. The existing PS5 is a 10.28-teraflop console, but comparing teraflops directly between these consoles is complicated due to changes in AMD’s RDNA architecture. While it sounds like tripling the teraflops would be a significant performance increase on the GPU side, comparing the base PS5 and PS5 Pro would be closer to 10.28 teraflops vs. around 17 teraflops.

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The original PS5 next to last year’s slimmer redesign.
Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

Sony now expects to sell 4 million fewer PS5 consoles in its 2023 fiscal year ending March 31st compared to previous projections, Bloomberg reports. The revision came as part of today’s third-quarter earnings release which saw Sony lower the PS5 sales forecast from the 25 million consoles it expected to sell down to 21 million.

While PS5 sales were up in Sony’s third quarter, increasing to 8.2 million units from 6.3 million in the same quarter the previous year, Bloomberg notes that this was roughly a million units lower than it had previously projected. That’s despite the release of the big first-party title Spider-Man 2, strong sales of third-party titles, and the launch of a new slimmer PS5 in November.

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