The next evolution of the PS5 is coming, and developers are getting their ducks in a row to take full advantage of the improved hardware. After months of rumors and whispers, we can confirm that Sony is preparing to release a souped-up version of the PS5, currently codenamed “Trinity,” likely by the end of this year, just in time for the 2024 holiday shopping season.

According to sources, the PS5 Pro will feature substantial upgrades under the hood aimed at supercharging graphics processing and ray tracing performance. At the core of the new console is a larger, more powerful GPU and a special high-frequency CPU mode clocking in at a blistering 3.85GHz – around 10% faster than the standard PS5’s CPU.

Related / Sony’s ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ label promises 60fps and ray tracing

But the crown jewel of the Trinity is its ray-tracing muscle. Sony expects the GPU rendering pipeline to be “about 45 percent faster than [the] standard PlayStation 5.” This turbo-charged performance is enabled by a combination of a bigger GPU, faster system memory, and what Sony is calling a “more powerful ray tracing architecture” that triples the speed of ray tracing calculations.

The improvements don’t stop there. Sony has made system memory a priority as well, increasing the bandwidth from 448GB/s to 576GB/s – a 28% bump. And games will be able to tap into an additional 1.2GB of system memory, bringing the total available pool to 13.7GB compared to 12.5GB on the original PS5.

But raw hardware tells only part of the story. The PS5 Pro will also debut Sony’s custom upscaling solution aimed at rivaling NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR technologies. Dubbed “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution” (PSSR), it relies on machine learning acceleration baked into the new console’s silicon, capable of a whopping 300 TOPS of 8-bit compute power.

According to briefing documents, PSSR promises to replace traditional temporal anti-aliasing and upsampling with AI-powered upscaling, complete with HDR support. Sony claims the latency for upscaling a 1080p image to 4K is around 2ms, with future plans to support resolutions up to 8K while further reducing latency.

The upgrades are substantial enough that Sony is instructing developers to ensure their games are compatible with the Trinity hardware. Games optimized for the Pro will bear a “Trinity Enhanced” label, indicating “significant enhancements” compared to their standard PS5 counterparts.

While the PS5 Pro pulls ahead on the hardware front, Sony isn’t abandoning the base PS5 model just yet. The company plans to continue selling the standard console alongside the Pro version. And in a shrewd move to ensure a smooth transition, developers will ship a single game package compatible with both models, with a post-launch patch enabling the Trinity enhancements.

If all goes according to plan, we could be unwrapping shiny new PS5 Pro consoles as early as this holiday season. Sony appears to be following the same roadmap as the PS4, rolling out a slimmer base model before debuting the supercharged Pro variant a few years later. With a beefed-up GPU, ray tracing heroics, smart upscaling tricks, and more memory to spare, the PS5 Pro is shaping up to be a holiday gift that keeps on giving for gamers with an appetite for cutting-edge visuals.