Sony PlayStation 5 Pro boosts graphics a little, price a lot

It’s that time of the console generation again, when the big players start refreshing their hardware for graphics boosts of arguable importance. Right on time, Sony has unveiled the PlayStation 5 Pro, with better buzzwords than last time at an absolutely eye-watering price.

The PS5 Pro’s main improvements focus on what Sony calls “The Big Three” – an upgraded GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI-driven upscaling. So, that GPU has 67% more compute units than the existing PS5 with 28% faster memory, which together provides up to 45% faster rendering during gameplay.

With ray tracing, the system calculates the precise path of light beams for more realistic and dynamic reflections and shadows. The PS5 Pro apparently doubles and sometimes even triples the speeds at which this fancy math is done, to minimize the usual frame rate slow-down you get with this mode. And finally, there’s the patented PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which uses AI to upscale the resolution of games.

Currently, most games give you a choice of fidelity or performance mode – the former focuses on ray tracing and 4K resolution at 30 frames per second, while the latter drops some of the detail in favor of a silky smooth 60-fps frame rate. According to PS5 Lead Architect Mark Cerny, some 75% of players choose performance mode, so the goal with the Pro console was to get the best of both worlds there.

“We want to give players the graphics that the game creators aspire to, at the high frame rates that players typically prefer,” Cerny says during a nine-minute presentation.

In practice though, it’s honestly pretty hard to tell the difference. That video moves on to a series of side-by-side comparisons, showcasing visual improvements so small even the snootiest of graphics sommeliers would need a magnifying glass to pick out.

Some of the console’s biggest titles will get free “PS5 Pro Enhanced” updates to make whatever use they can of those improvements. Backwards compatible PS4 games will also get an uprezzin’.

These upgrades don’t come cheap, though – the PS5 Pro price tag is a gut punch at US$700 (£700, €800, AU$1,200). To put it in Sony’s terms, that’s about a 55% increase on the current price. But maybe the biggest insult is that the console doesn’t actually come with a disc drive. If you want the basic ability to play physical games, you’ll have to fork out the extra US$80 on top of that. They couldn’t even throw the $30 vertical stand in the box this time.

As compensation, the PS5 Pro has at least doubled the built-in SSD space, up to a roomy 2 TB. But it’s better to have options – the PlayStation digital store frequently and bafflingly lists games at higher prices than physical retail. To speed up all that downloading you’ll be doing, Sony has also upgraded the wireless tech to Wi-Fi 7, but whether that will even help depends on your location, router, internet connection and provider.

Honestly, our launch model PS5 is running just fine, so we’ll probably stick with that for now. Your move, Microsoft: can you make us care about an Xbox Series Pro Max or whatever?

The PlayStation 5 Pro launches on November 7. You can watch the presentation in the video below.

Source: PlayStation blog