The first reveal – of sorts – for PlayStation 5 has been and gone, with Sony confirming specs including an octo-core Zen 2 CPU, custom Navi graphics, hardware-accelerated 3D audio, solid state storage and PS4 backwards compatibility. Specifics such as CPU/GPU frequencies and memory allocation remain unknown, but some unlikely – if not downright unbelievable – detective work may have helped to fill in the blanks. This is a story I’ve been following with interest for three months now with varying degrees of scepticism, but the evidence is starting to look compelling. Bizarrely, it seems that a next-generation gaming processor is being tested on PC benchmarking tool 3DMark – and there’s a reasonable possibility that it’s PlayStation 5 silicon.
We’ve seen some unbelievable stories play out in the past, be it the PlayStation 3 Slim making a baffling debut in a Phillipines marketplace, two months ahead of launch. Then there was our first look at the PS4 Slim, materialising in Manchester UK, after early Middle-Eastern units somehow appearing on classified ads site, Gumtree. But next-gen processors appearing on 3DMark’s results database? That’s something else.
The story begins in January, with a Twitter post from Thailand-based technology spy, TUM_Apisak. Apisak has a proven track record in unearthing new hardware by scanning through the online databases of benchmarks from titles like Final Fantasy 15, Ashes of the Singularity – and of course, 3DMark. In the case of the new AMD-designed processor he uncovered, the data tends reveals two crucial pieces of information – a codename and a product code. Prior leaks also gave scores for each of the tests, but it looks like 3DMark has started to hide these results on the latest entries.
Source: Eurogamer In Theory: is PS5 powered by an AMD Gonzalo processor?