It’s basically a clean sweep for Sony and PlayStation news, leaks and rumours in this week’s DF Direct Weekly news stories. That kicks off by picking up a thread from last week about the ‘Project Trinity’ PS5 Pro leak that emerged, before moving onto the remarkable – and very real – price cuts we saw on the existing PlayStation 5 model. Meanwhile, compelling footage and photos of the Project Q handheld emerged, raising more questions than answers about the nature of the hardware.
I talked a little last week about the PS5 Pro specification as outed by journalist Tom Henderson. He’s previously established trust in his sources by correctly predicting the Project Q handheld, but the jury’s still out on his reports on the new PlayStation 5 model with a detachable/optional BD drive. The specs he offers for Trinity amount to 30 WGPs, 18000 MT/s memory, an ‘8K performance mode’ and ‘accelerated ray tracing’. The chip at the heart of the machine is codenamed Viola, a state of affairs corroborated by Kepler, who seems to have know about this – and other – AMD processors since at least March or April.
In the Direct, we talk about what a PS5 Pro could actually deliver that’s worthwhile to the audience, having previously not seen the point in the machine. The leaked spec does suggest that a PS4 Pro-like device is viable: not quite the doubling of compute units we saw in the Pro, but there’s the potential for much higher clock speeds to still deliver a notional 2x boost to performance. The faster memory would be in line with the kind of bandwidth increases we saw in the Pro, but really, it’s what we don’t know that is arguably more important.
00:00:00 Introduction00:00:50 News 01: PS5 Pro detailed in new rumours00:29:08 News 02: Big PS5 summer discounts: what could they mean?00:37:48 News 03: Project Q handheld potentially leaked00:46:09 News 04: Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart vs PS4 HDD00:59:13 Supporter Q1: Why don’t developers include an uncapped mode in games, for the benefit of more powerful future consoles?01:03:58 Supporter Q2: Are teraflop figures for GPU hardware pointless nowadays?01:08:53 Supporter Q3: Could Rich be given the high-end PC version in system comparison videos for once?01:10:49 Supporter Q4: Oliver operates in a totally different timezone to everyone else at DF. Is this ever helpful?01:12:26 Supporter Q5: What are the benefits of playing on original hardware if the console can be emulated very effectively?
Firstly, there’s the question of backwards compatibilty. Sony achieved this on PS5 and PS4 Pro by delivering hardware symmetry with prior systems. PS4 Pro literally doubled/mirrored the existing GPU and could effectively disable the second half of it to maintain compatibility with the older system. PS5 had the same compute unit count as PS4 Pro and relied on hardware back-compat to get the job done. Achieving the same on PS5 with 60 compute units may suggest a different strategy on Sony’s part this time. A 60 CU part with hardware symmetry along the lines of the PS4 Pro would require an 80 CU GPU, which would be a tremendous amount of wastage.