The PlayStation 5 Pro: 5 things you need to know about Sony's mighty new console
Sony’s upgraded PS5 is just around the corner...
It doesn’t celebrate its fourth birthday for another few months, but Sony has already decided that the PlayStation 5 is old news, with the Japanese giant today announcing the PS5 Pro after months of rumours.
This isn’t the beginning of a new generation of PlayStation - it’s more of a mid-gen refresh in the mould of the PS4 Pro from the previous generation. Sony says both hardcore gamers and developers demand even more graphical fidelity from their games, and the PS5 Pro gives them it.
Will the PS5 Pro be worth the considerably higher price compared to the base machine? And will you want to upgrade? We won’t have the answers to either of those rather important questions until we have one sat under our telly, but we do have all the important information following today’s brief Technical Presentation stream, which was hosted by the PS5’s Lead Architect, Mark Cerny.
Here’s everything you need to know about the PS5 Pro.
1. It’s a lot more powerful than the PS5
Modern console gaming has become a lot more PC-like since the PS5 and Xbox Series X launched in 2020, with many titles making players choose between fidelity mode, which gives you the highest possible resolution, often capped at 30fps, and performance, which prioritises high frame rates. Sony says that gamers overwhelmingly favour the latter, with buttery smooth 60fps performance winning over true 4K visuals. But Sony doesn’t want players to have to choose one or the other, and the goal of the PS5 Pro is to narrow the gap between the two modes.
To achieve this, it has upgraded the PS5’s GPU, with the PS5 Pro getting a 67% increase in Compute Units and 28% faster memory, resulting in 45% faster rendering of gameplay. What does all that mean? Games should run much smoother without sacrificing visual clarity, with Sony also introducing an AI upscaling tool it’s calling PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which uses machine learning to add more detail and boost the resolution of your games.
The PS5 Pro also upgrades the previous console’s ray tracing capabilities, resulting in better reflections and more realistic casting of shadows, but not at the expense of those all-important frames. Overall, Sony says you can expect fidelity mode-level visuals at double the frame rate in many games.
2. The PS5 library will take advantage of the upgraded console straight away
With all the tech-speak out of the way, you’ll want to know whether the PS5 Pro will improve your PS5 games from the jump. Sony says a number of games will be patched with free updates that make use of PS5 Pro’s new features. You’ll see a PS5 Pro Enhanced label when a game has been updated, and they won’t just be PlayStation Studios’ own games.
Sony lists 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 and The Last of Us Part II Remastered as initial PS5 Pro Enhanced games, but no word on whether they’ll all be updated for launch.
And it isn’t just PS5 games that will benefit, with PS5 Pro Game Boost capable of improving the performance and resolution of the more than 8,500 backward compatible PS4 games.
3. It looks very similar to the PS5, but there’s one controversial difference
Sony is sticking to the striking, if divisive, white-and-black colorway of the PS5 with the Pro machine at launch, and the console is the same shape, width and height as its predecessor. You’ll notice that the upgraded console has a new black grille across the front faceplate, presumably for improved ventilation.
What’s changed? Well, unlike the original PS5, which you could buy either with a built-in disc drive or as an all-digital machine, the PS5 Pro doesn’t offer the former at all as standard. If you want a disc drive for physical games or watching 4K Blu-rays you’ll need to purchase a separate add-on, which Sony currently charges £99.99 for.
We reckon this one is going to be a big no-no for a lot of gamers who still prefer having physical libraries or use their PS5 as a Blu-ray player.
You’ll also need to buy the vertical stand separately if you wish to stand the console upright.
4. It’ll work with all your existing PS5 accessories
The PS5 already has an extensive range of accessories and add-on products, such as PlayStation VR2, the PlayStation Portal handheld, the DualSense Edge, Access Controller, and the Pulse Elite and Explore headsets. As you’d expect, these will all work as normal with the PS5 Pro, though it looks like you’ll still need to use a dongle with the latter.
Sony says the user interface and network services will be unchanged from the standard PS5.
5. It’s very expensive
The PS5 Pro will cost you - brace yourselves - a cool £699.99 when it launches on November 7. That’s more than £200 more than the original console and the Slim model that has since replaced it, both of which cost £479.99. To put that into perspective, you can buy a regular PS5 and a Nintendo Switch Lite for the same price as the PS5 Pro, and still have cash to spare. And you don’t get a disc drive.
The PS5 Pro does ship with a 2TB SSD as standard, which is more than twice as much storage as the PS5, and Sony will be hoping that this, as well as the various power upgrades, will be enough to convince gamers to part with their cash.
The PS5 Pro arrives on November 7 and can be pre-ordered from September 26.
