The PS5 Pro is in the house – what do you want to know?

It’s been a long time coming – more than a year since rumors started circulating on the Web, in fact – but the wait is finally over: the PlayStation5 Pro will be available to purchase on November 7th and yours truly just received the test unit needed for a number of The Point Online articles planned. We’ll be focusing on the hardware, the games, the user experience and the features of the PS5 Pro over the next few days, following with stories about the market impact this product will have and what that will mean for gamers, both short-term and long-term.

Sony required any PS5 Pro coverage to be offered in three stages, so we can only reveal the packaging today – which does not sound like much but, oddly enough, there are a few things worth talking about. At first glance the packaging of the PS5 Pro is quite similar to that of the PS5 Slim Digital Edition – that is, black all around, sporting the same high-contrast design with the white console itself – but the Pro logo, along with that price tag, makes it clear enough that this is not the standard PS5.

The 2TB of storage space is confirmed on the packaging, but we’ll have to see whether that’s all on-board storage or whether the expansion slot is also used for that purpose (Sony’s embargo does not allow for disassembling of the PS5 Pro by the media). At the back there’s nothing out of the ordinary to report: the PS5 Pro comes with the same DualSense controller the standard PS5 does, there’s talk about PSSR and advanced raytracing and… that’s about it. We’ll have more on what’s included in the retail box of the PS5 Pro on November 4th.

What may strike many people as weird with the PS5 Pro packaging is the fact that it does not mention anything about 8K support – something that, infamously, the OG PS5 packaging claimed the system would offer at some point in the future but never did. In this case it’s weird because not only does the PS5 Pro actually support 8K displays and 8K content (i.e. 8K resolution in games), but it does so at launch: both F1 2024 and Gran Turismo 7 are already confirmed to offer 8K display modes by leveraging Sony’s proprietary PSSR upscaling tech, for instance.

Instead of adorning the 8K logo on its packaging, though, the PS5 Pro just mentions support for 4K displays at 120 Hz like the standard PS5. People may recall yours truly predicting back in early September that the 8K logo was removed from the packaging of the PS5 Slim not just because it does not support 8K, but also because Sony would like that logo to signify a competitive advantage of the PS5 Pro. As it turns out… no. Does Sony think of 8K support as unimportant in gaming? Maybe the company got cold feet about 8K in general? Who knows? 4K120 it is, then, at least for the time being.

On a different note, yours truly was sadly wrong about another thing regarding the PS5 Pro: it’s now confirmed by Sony that the new system is not compatible with the faceplates already available for the PS5 Slim. The respective sizes of the plates are extremely similar, just as the initially leaked pictures implied, but the small “teeth” on the PS5 Pro itself – where the faceplates are actually attached and secured – are placed in a different way compared to the PS5 Slim. So there.

Off to testing this thing, then, in order to find out how much value this new PlayStation actually holds for consumers. In the meantime, what would you like to know about the PS5 Pro? Drop us an e-mail with any specific questions you may have and we’ll do our very best to include all the answers in our forthcoming PS5 Pro review, our PS5 Pro FAQ or in other relevant stories published by The Point Online soon.