Rumor mill: It's pretty much a certainty that Sony will release a PS5 Pro at some point. The company hasn't made any official announcements about the upgraded console or a potential release date, but according to a new report, the machine is in development and has a tentative launch date of late 2024.
The launch date claim comes from Insider Gaming, which cites unnamed sources. It notes that a recently-published patent by PlayStation architect Mark Cerny suggests Sony will put a lot of focus on better ray tracing abilities in the PS5 Pro. The new console will also come with the usual improvements to visual fidelity and general performance expected in a PS Pro model.
The patent was filed by PS5 architect and Knack creator Mark Cerny, and mentions "System And Method For Accelerated Ray Tracing" and "System And Method For Accelerated Ray Tracing With Asynchronous Operation And Ray Transformation."#PS5 #PlayStation5 #PlayStation pic.twitter.com/yyjL8SMfRw
--- Gamingnews (@Onion00048) February 25, 2022
While these sorts of reports should be taken with a pinch of salt, it's easy to imagine that Sony would want to launch a PS5 Pro during next year's holiday season. The PlayStation 4 was released on November 13, 2013, with the PS4 Pro arriving on November 16, 2016 - three years later.
The PlayStation 5 launched on November 12, 2020, so we're closing in on the three-year mark for the PS5 Pro. But the PS4 never faced a global pandemic and an unprecedented chip crisis. Up until recently, buying a PS5 was an almost impossible task unless you were willing to pay scalpers or extra money for bundle packs, if available.
In January, Sony said buying a PS5 should be much easier. It also increased supplies of the console in the run-up to the PSVR 2 launch. Skyrocketing sales gave the PS5 its best quarter to date in Q4 2022 and have helped make Sony AMD's biggest customer.
On the other side of the argument, the chip shortage isn't entirely over, and many developers are still releasing games on both PS4 and PS5, limiting how hard they can push the latter's hardware, so Sony might want to wait a bit longer than 2024 to launch a PS5 Pro.
Insider Gaming also believes that a new version of the PS5 with a detachable disc drive (via USB-C) will land this year, phasing out the current PlayStation 5 model. That would mean two new PlayStation models launching within around 12 months of each other, which seems unlikely. As for the PS6, the publication believes that the next-gen machine won't arrive until at least 2028, which does sound more reasonable.
Last May, an AMD job listing for a system-on-chip verification engineer suggested it was already preparing for the PlayStation 6's chip development.