New rumors claim that Sony has not one, but two PlayStation 5 consoles planned for launch this year. The more powerful SKU – which will presumably be called the PS5 Pro – is said to be on equal footing with Microsoft’s Xbox Series X.
The word comes from NeoGAF’s VFXVeteran, an industry professional who’s been “vetted” by forum staff. He claims that the base PlayStation 5 will offer 9 teraflops (TFLOPS) of performance – 3 TFLOPS less than the Xbox Series X – but Sony will close that gap with a Pro model.
As Microsoft pointed out this week, a teraflop equals one trillion floating point operations per second. This impressive-sounding performance metric has been a central marketing point for the Xbox team, but it’s too early to tell how TFLOPS translates into actual gaming performance.
1 Teraflop: A unit of computing speed equal to one trillion floating point operations per second
— Xbox (@Xbox) February 25, 2020
12 Teraflops: Xbox Series X
Previous rumors had suggested that Microsoft would also be releasing a weaker next-generation Xbox, codenamed “Lockhart.” That console should be a match for the standard PS5, but according to VFXVeteran, the hierarchy of the upcoming consoles actually goes like this: “XSX = PS5 Pro > PS5 > Lockheart.”
It isn’t clear whether the PS5 and PS5 Pro will launch on the same day, but VFXVeteran believes that the time frame should be similar. Apparently, Sony wants both consoles to “run the entire seven-year cycle.”
Of course, all of this could be conjecture, but we did hear a similar report of Sony launching a pro model of the PlayStation 5 back in September. Japanese journalist Zenji Nishikawa claimed that he had heard rumors of a PS5 and PS5 launching simultaneously during last year’s Computer Entertainment Developers Conference in Yokohama.