Five things we already know about the PS5 Pro

After more than a year of rumors about it making the rounds on the Web – Tom Henderson first mentioned this all the way back in July 2023 – it seems that we are now mere days away from the announcement of the PlayStation5 Pro, Sony’s mid-generation refresh of the most popular gaming console currently available. There’s been a number of credible information leaks (especially during February and March), but the company remained silent on the matter, only choosing to step in when internal documents about the product were published on YouTube.

Since then several other sources have chimed in, contributing with pieces of information about the PS5 Pro here and there, and now everyone expects that Sony will be announcing the new system at some point before or at the Tokyo Game Show (September 26th) with the intent of releasing it in November or early December. Developers are already hard at work making their latest games compatible with the PS5 Pro, most probably even going for a “PS5 Pro Enhanced” label by optimizing aspects of their titles for it.

Since Sony refrained from even admitting the existence of the PS5 Pro, let alone confirming its tech specs or added capabilities, there is no official information available for the system as of yet. But there are certain things about this new model that most sources agree on and – along with previously leaked information – they may be just enough to give people an idea of what to expect from this new PlayStation. Here are five of those things, in no particular order, that yours truly expects to be confirmed before the end of September. Shall we?

The design of the PS5 Pro will be very similar to that of the PS5

This comes as no surprise, really, even if some of us hoped for a more daring approach: Sony could have gone for a more aggressive or futuristic design for the PS5 Pro – it will be the most powerful PlayStation for the next three years minimum after all – but it seems that the company opted for the same design language followed by all PS5 products up until now. Recent leaks regarding the new model talk of a rather similar but slightly taller, slightly wider console (more in line with the original PS5 than the PS5 Slim), sporting three metallic black stripes or cut-outs on either side of its chassis instead of the one cut-out present on the current PS5 model.

It’s eerily reminiscent of the “three-slice” design of the 2016 PS4 Pro – compared to the original and the Slim version of the PS4 – making it perfectly clear that the PS5 Pro belongs to the same product family as the PS5 and the PS5 Slim while remaining immediately recognizable. The extra stripes may also be covering a part of the chassis that’s necessary for better ventilation, although that remains to be seen.

All in all, though, if this is indeed the form of the PS5 Pro it’s not going to change the mind of those who love or hate the design of the original or the Slim models: same lines, same vibes, so to speak.

The PS5 Pro will be compatible with the faceplates and optical drive of the PS5 Slim

As a result of Sony’s design choices regarding the PS5 Pro – but most probably something already factored in during the design process of last year’s PS5 Slim – it’s more than likely that owners of the new model will be able to use the four-piece covers as well as the optional disc drive accessory of the current model.

This benefits pretty much everyone involved: consumers will be able to give their PS5 Pro the look they like the most – there are currently four official sets of colored covers available plus a few more made by other manufacturers – retailers will have to stock fewer different accessories, while Sony will not have to set up different production lines for covers or optical disc drives specifically made for the new model.

This also means that the company will be able to offer a Digital Edition of the PS5 Pro, either at launch or later on, allowing for a lower price point.

The PS5 Pro will be capable of displaying games in 8K

Sure, there is always the possibility of Sony removing the 8K logo from the packaging of the PS5 a few months back to be a coincidence, but… let’s be real here. Αfter leaving it there for almost four years, did the company’s leadership only recently realized that the original PS5 was never able to deliver any modern games in 8K?

No, that logo was removed for two reasons. Reason number one: there is no point in enabling the PS5 to even display 8K video at 24/30 frames per second, because no widely available streaming service supports 8K and Sony’s own Media Player app for the PS4/PS5 doesn’t either (in case anyone was interested in playing back 8K video files stored locally).

Reason number two: there will be another PS5 model that is actually capable of displaying games in 8K. We are not talking about Black Myth Wukong or Cyberpunk 2077 here, obviously, but the PS5 Pro will be able to run visually simple games at 8K thanks to its PSSR upscaling tech. Will many people find this useful? No. Will it help 8K TVs score higher sales at long last? Also no. Will Sony bring it up as a feature at some point, if not at launch? Yes. Will Kazunori Yamauchi try to dazzle the press by demonstrating Gran Turismo 7 replays in 8K? Probably. Will it matter? No – and that’s just about it.

The PS5 Pro will not support PCIe 5.0 SSDs

According to the leaked technical documents that made the rounds on the Web during March and April, the PS5 Pro will be based on the same hardware platform the original PS5 is built on. It will sport a much more powerful GPU, a slightly faster CPU, a custom AI co-processor, faster RAM (and more of those 16GB usable by games) as well as a somewhat improved audio subsystem. In some respects it will be the first cross-gen console, of sorts, but since it will still rely on AMD’s Zen2 architecture it will not support PCIe 5.0 – so its storage expansion slot will not be able to make use of the fastest SSDs currently available for PC.

While it could have been an interesting option in the long term, this is clearly no great loss for PlayStation gamers. Not only are PCIe 5.0 NVME SSDs very expensive compared to their 4.0 counterparts, the PS5 Pro would most probably be unable to leverage their extra data transfer speed in any case. Games for the PS5/PS5 Pro are not designed to really make use of transfer speeds higher than 5.5 GB/sec for uncompressed data anyway, since that’s the data transfer rate at which the built-in SSD present in every PS5 operates.

Past tests proved that PS5 games do not run perceivably faster when stored in PCIe 4.0 SSDs connected to that expansion slot and rated at 7 GB/sec – let alone the 10, 12 or 14 GB/sec offered by the most expensive PCIe 5.0 SSDs available today. So… yeah. The PS5 Pro will not support the latter and that’s perfectly fine.

The PS5 Pro will be more expensive than the current PS5

It may look like putting this one on the list of things “we already know” is stretching it, but recent developments make this all but certain. There was some glimmer of hope online over the summer that Sony would maybe reduce the price of the current PS5 models in order to release the PS5 Pro at the PS5’s launch price point, just as it had done in autumn 2016 with the PS4 Slim and the PS4 Pro. It’s been almost four years since the original PS5 came to market, after all, and the technology it’s based on is now no less than six years old.

But with the company recently increasing the retail price of both PS5 Slim models in Japan and insisting on several occasions that manufacturing costs of the machine remain high, the PS5 Pro will most probably launch at $599, $649, $699 or even $749, depending on how confident Sony feels about its capabilities and the software taking advantage of them. The company could settle on two of those four possible price points in order to offer versions of the PS5 Pro with or without an optical disc drive (even if some might argue that a PS5 Pro console should be coming with one by default).

Since the PS5 is still doing well sales-wise, it seems that any price cut it may be getting this year will be temporary (e.g. on Black Friday or Cyber Monday) and that the PS5 Pro will not be asking for just $499 come November or December. Sony might still pleasantly surprise us all, no matter how unlikely that seems right now, but the PS5 Pro is to be positioned as a premium product – and those come with a price tag to match.

The PS5 Pro may very well come with 2TB of storage

It might be stretching the meaning of what “we already know” about this new PS5 model even more, but it makes a lot of sense: if yours truly was a betting man, he’d easily put money on the likelihood of the PS5 Pro coming with not 1TB, but 2TB of storage. It’s not just a guess either: YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead, who has been making various bits of PS5 Pro information available since February, claimed during his recent Broken Silicon podcast that he’s already seen a PS5 Pro devkit (systems programmers use to make and test games) and that it was sporting 2TB of storage.

Console devkits are very often configured in a different way than the retail versions of the same products, but granting such machines a larger SSD does not actually help all that much in most games development processes or in testing. It would also make sense for a Pro version of a gaming console to offer twice the storage capacity of the “vanilla” one (the PS5 Slim already sports an 1TB SSD) and that way the PS5 Pro would match the storage of the latest Xbox Series X model (which comes with a 2TB SSD for $599).

More importantly, though, a PS5 Pro offering 2TB of storage would make it a much better deal for demanding gamers, as internal SSDs of 1TB of storage for the PS5’s expansion slot currently go for anything between $100 and $150. It would cost Sony way, way less than that to put NAND chips of twice that storage capacity on a PS5 Pro’s motherboard – and it would go a long way toward justifying the higher price point of the new model.

Now all we have to do is wait for a bit

All of the above are more than likely to be confirmed over the next few weeks, if nothing else for the simple fact that they make sense for Sony too (given its track record and previous choices). The company might still surprise us with something totally unheard of about the PlayStation5 Pro that it somehow managed to keep under wraps despite the information leaks happening… but that is rather unlikely at this point.

It’s fair to say, though, that Sony’s pricing strategy is what most people interested in a PS5 Pro are eager to know about, as well as what they can expect from the new model in terms of software support. Not long now!