Sony has just officially unveiled the PlayStation 5 Pro with a detailed explanation about what it does better than the standard PlayStation 5. It comes out on November 7 of this year and will not have a disc drive for the price of $700 meaning the PS5 Pro will cost even more if you want physical games. It comes with a 2TB SSD and the other standard accessories like the DualSense controller, which remains unchanged.
The announcement was made through an expected livestream hosted by system architect Mark Cerny, and under the hood, the PlayStation 5 Pro has a larger GPU, improved ray tracing, and of course, AI upscaling for existing games in the PS library.
Sony promises 67% more compute units compared to the standard console, and RAM that is 28% faster as well. This means that the overall performance improvement you’ll get with the new console, compared to the original, is about 45%. This aims to make the gameplay experience smoother while retaining quality. Ray tracing sees a major bump and should be 2-3 times better than the original PS5.
Most interestingly, Sony has confirmed that the new pro console comes with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, an AI-powered upscaling tech that uses machine learning to increase the sharpness of games without taxing the GPU as hard as it would natively.
To make sure people who buy the new console aren’t left waiting for games to support the more powerful internals, the PlayStation 5 Pro will come with Game Boost, which can improve the performance of PlayStation 4 and 5 games while enhancing image quality, and will support over 8,500 games.
Not unlike the PlayStation 5 Slim, the Pro will also not come with a disc drive, but it can be purchased separately for another $79.99. This is being considered a missed opportunity by fans, considering its already steep price of $700.
Unlike in the past, when the Pro version of the PlayStation 4 targeted higher resolutions and framerates, the PS5 Pro will only try to make sure that games run on the Fidelity setting while having the framerates of the Performance mode. So if you were expecting 8K 120 FPS, you’ll have to wait for the PlayStation 6.
