Forget about April 2020. The first new next-gen Sony gaming consoles (or the PlayStation 5 or PS5 to most everyone else) is now expected to hit store shelves in the last quarter of 2020.

A new and very credible leak reveals Sony wants next-gen to get here in time for the 2020 holiday season. Add to that, Sony might launch next-gen, and the more powerful PS5 Pro, simultaneously during next year's shopping season.

Sony has tried to remain super tight-lipped about its PS5 launch plans or pricing for the next-gen console. But when it leaks, it leaks.

PS5 will come in both a regular and a Pro model, affirms Japanese journalist Zenji Nishikawa to confirm reports swirling around the Internet. But unlike other leakers, Nishikawa also knows something about pricing for the PS5 Pro. He claims this baby will cost anywhere from $100 to $150 more than the base model.

Nishikawa has a great track record for getting his predictions right and we're with him on these latest ones. Proof: he revealed accurate details about Nintendo Switch Lite before its official announcement.

In contrast to Sony's secrecy as regards the launch date, price and launch configuration, the company seems to be somewhat lax in other technical details of this new console.

We already know the upcoming PS5 and PS5 Pro will be much, much more powerful than the PS4 and PS4 Pro. Chalk this up to a more powerful built-in SSD that makes for blitz-fast loading and more powerful AMD chips (including a 7nm Ryzen processor and a Radeon Navi-family GPU).

Mark Cerny, lead system architect on the next-gen PlayStation, also affirmed the upcoming console won't merely be a simple upgrade. The next-gen might be the true generational shift some tech pundits have said it will be. In the next-gen's case, the generational shift will mean a shift to more power.

Cerny confirmed next-gen will use AMD's Ryzen, which comes with eight cores of AMD’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The new console will rely on the custom Radeon Navi-family GPU that includes support for real-time ray-tracing rendering.

Ray tracing is a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments. No gaming console in the world today is capable of ray tracing. Next-gen will be the first -- hopefully.

And Cerny said next-gen will ship with SSD storage because of the pressing need for fast loading times and larger bandwidth that will make games more immersive. SSD will also support the required content streaming from disc for 8K graphics resolutions.

PlayStation 4
PS4 owners can now signup and register to be part of Sony's firmware beta updates. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
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