The worst kept secret in the industry has finally been announced. During a short event earlier today, Mark Cerny of PlayStation revealed the PS5 Pro, a powered-up version of the existing console, and you better be prepared to sell a few organs if you want to buy one.
Arriving on November 7, the new PS5 Pro boasts a terrifying price-tag of £699/$699 with pre-orders going live on September 26. For context, the PS5 (with disc drive) launched in 2020 for £449.99/$499.99.
So, what exactly are you getting for money? Well, according to the brief presentation, the main aim of the PS5 Pro is to put an end to the current trend of having Performance and Fidelity modes. In other words, it seeks to marry the 60FPS, usually targeted by performance modes, with all the visual bells and whistles of Fidelity mode. It sounds pretty good on paper, delivering on the initial promise of this generation of hardware.
It’ll achieve this thanks to a few things, starting with a beefier GPU which Sony says “has 67 percent more Compute Units than the current PS5 and 28 percent faster memory. Overall, this enables up to 45 percent faster rendering.”
The more powerful GPU will be aided by PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, the company’s own version of upscaling using machine learning.
There’s also new Ray Tracing tech under the hood, with Sony boasting that “this allows the rays to be cast at double, and at times triple, the speeds of the current PS5 console.” And yes, casting rays does make it sound like the PS5 Pro has a small wizard packed away somewhere, which would be a truly excellent selling point.
Alll of this will be packed into a slightly redesigned shell that has the same dimensions as the current PS5 slim model. You’ll also get double the storage at 2TB. And yes, Astro’s Playroom will come pre-installed.
The Pro won’t ship with a disc drive, so if you want to play physical media, be it games or 4K movies, you’ll need to shell out another £100 for the standalone disc drive. Oh, and for some fucking stupid reason the new console won’t come with a vertical stand by default, so if you want that you’ll need to spend another £25, bringing the grand total to £825.
Will the PS5 Pro improve all your old games? Yes, according to Sony. The new PS5 Pro Game Boost will apply to over 8,500 older games across PS5 and PS4.
According to Sony, “This feature may stabilize or improve the performance of supported PS4 and PS5 games. Enhanced image quality for PS4 games is also available to improve the resolution on select PS4 games.”
My assumption is that the enhanced image quality will come from the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution.
As for games that will take advantage of the PS5 Pro straight out of the box, Sony has announced a handful of titles that will be marked as “PS5 pro Enhanced.”
- Alan Wake 2
- Assassin’s Creed: Shadows
- Demon’s Souls
- Dragon’s Dogma 2
- Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
- Gran Turismo 7
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Horizon Forbidden West
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
- The Crew Motorfest
- The First Descendant
- The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered
So there we have it – Sony’s new machine is set to offer some big performance increases across the board, but it comes at a substantial cost.
Personally, I was hyped before the announcement but the asking price means I won’t be picking up a PS5 Pro anytime soon.
How about you? Are you interested in getting the latest and greatest hardware, or is the price a little too steep?
