Rumor: PlayStation 5 Pro’s RDNA GPU runs at 16.7 TFLOPS, not 33 or 36 TFLOPS from previous rumors

So who shared rumors that were wrong and right?

We can now confirm that some previous rumors about the performance and capabilities of the PlayStation 5 Pro have just been debunked.

As reported by Insider Gaming, several gamers have received their PlayStation 5 Pro pre-orders early. Now they haven’t gotten them early enough to test on consoles. But they did share photos 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 is the information 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 that Sony placed on the original PlayStation 5 but later removed.

We will focus on GPU performance as this became a popular topic of discussion among fans and we received conflicting rumors from various sources. But first, let’s clarify: what exactly is a teraflop?

Teraflop refers to one trillion floating point operations per second. In plain English, it is a unit of measure that indicates how good a computer is at performing mathematical calculations. Very simple: the higher the number, the better the computer performs.

The 16.7 TFLOPS on the PlayStation 5 Pro box is a marked improvement over the 10 TFLOPS on the base PlayStation 5. Until Digital Foundry or other testers run their tests, we have no basis for comparison on which to question this claim. AMD has provided a custom GPU for Sony, and all we know is that it has AMD’s RDNA GPU architecture.

But we can now check past rumors and see who seemed to have the right information, and who spread disinformation, either because it was poorly sourced or in a way that raises questions about their credibility.

Our first report of such a rumor dates back to December 2023. ResetEra user RandomlyRandom67 claimed that the GPU had a dual problem and was thus able to perform in a range between 14.33 and 28.67 TFLOPS.

In April this year, YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead revealed information that was allegedly leaked from the PlayStation developer portal. Other news sources, including Insider Gaming and IGN, reported that this information was accurate. And the developers were apparently told that the GPU could run at 33.5 TFLOPS.

And so, as strange as it may seem, the information that Moore’s Law Is Dead allegedly illegally obtained was apparently false. IGN and Insider Gaming have independently confirmed that this information is accurate, so it could mean one of two things.

Either they all had bad sources, or the information was as stated in the dev portal, but they didn’t really understand it. The original YouTube video where Moore’s Law Is Dead shared this information was DMCA’d by Sony, and you might assume they did this because the information there was accurate and they didn’t like the data breach, or inaccurate, and they were they block disinformation.

We can only investigate this to a limited extent as the video is no longer online. But what we can say is that even if news outlets that can certify their sources, like IGN, report on a rumor, that doesn’t mean the rumor is 100% accurate.

It’s possible that Sony has made changes to the PlayStation 5 Pro. Or it’s possible that the leaked information was incomplete and lacked context about the final product. But we certainly encourage our readers to remain skeptical when you read rumors like this, even when we report them.