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.
