We can now confirm some earlier rumors about the PlayStation 5 Pro’s performance and capabilities have just been debunked.
As reported by Insider Gaming, several gamers got their PlayStation 5 Pro pre-orders early. Now, they haven’t gotten them early enough to do testing on the consoles yet. But they did share pictures of the box, and that’s where we can scrutinize those early rumors, to determine who got it wrong, and who got it right.
Here’s the information found in the box:
- CPU – x86-64-AMD Ryzen Zen 2 8-core/16-thread
- GPU – An unspecified RDNA GPU at 16.7 TFLOPS
- RAM – GDDR6 16 GB (for graphics) + DDR5 2 GB (for operations)
- Power Supply – 390W
- Storage – 2TB SSD
The box also no longer has the 8K label, a label Sony placed on the original PlayStation 5 but removed later on.
We will focus on the GPU performance because this became a popular talking point among fans, and we got conflicting rumors from different sources. But first, let’s clarify: what even is a teraflop?
Teraflop refers to one trillion floating-point operations per second. In plain English, it’s a unit of measurement for how good a computer is in performing mathematical calculations. Quite simply, the higher the number, the better performing the computer is.
The 16.7 TFLOPS listed on the PlayStation 5 Pro box is a clear improvement over the 10 TFLOPS on the base PlayStation 5. Until Digital Foundry or other testers do their testing, we don’t have a basis of comparison to interrogate this claim. AMD provided a custom GPU for Sony, and all we know is it has AMD’s RDNA GPU architecture.
But we can now check on earlier rumors and verify who seemed to have accurate information, and who spread misinformation, either because their sourcing was bad, or in a way that raises questions about their credibility.
Our first report of such a rumor dates all the way back to December 2023. ResetEra user RandomlyRandom67 claimed that the GPU was dual issue, and so could perform in a range between 14.33 to 28.67 TFLOPS.
In April of this year, YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead revealed information that was allegedly leaked from the PlayStation developer portal. Other news outlets, including Insider Gaming and IGN, reported this information as accurate. And the devs were apparently told the GPU could run at 33.5 TFLOPS.
And so, as strange as it seems, the information Moore’s Law Is Dead allegedly acquired through illegal means was apparently wrong. IGN and Insider Gaming independently corroborated this information to be accurate, so it could mean two things.
Either they all had bad sources, or the information was what was indicated in the dev portal, but they did not actually understand it. The original YouTube video where Moore’s Law Is Dead shared this information was DMCA’d by Sony, and that could be taken that they did so because the information there was accurate and they didn’t like the data leak, or inaccurate, and they were blocking misinformation.
We can only scrutinize this so much since the video is no longer online. But what we can say is that even when news outlets who can certify their sources like IGN report on a rumor, that doesn’t mean that rumor is 100 % accurate.
It’s possible that Sony made changes to the PlayStation 5 Pro. Or it’s possible that the information that was leaked was incomplete, and lacked context on the final product. But we certainly encourage our readers to keep a skeptical eye whenever you read rumors like this, including when we report it.
