The PS5 Pro unveiled: more money, more power?

After more than a year of rumors making the rounds on the Web about it, it’s finally here: Sony has officially announced the PS5 Pro, the most powerful PlayStation the company has ever put together, to the point that it may very well deserve to be called a cross-gen system rather than a mid-generation refresh. The PS5 Pro will be made available on November 7th at participating retailers and directly from Sony’s PlayStation e-store for $699/€799/£699. Pre-orders will begin on September 26th.

Mark Cerny, PlayStation’s lead system architect, hosted a YouTube presentation so as to explain what the PS5 Pro is and what it will strive to achieve. Despite the title of the video, Cerny refrained from purely focusing on the technical aspects of this new PS5 model. He rather described it as a gaming console that can offer players high graphical fidelity and high frame rates at the same time (instead of having them choose between one or the other). It’s a simple enough way to nail what the PS5 Pro is about, even if YouTube’s compression algorithm did Cerny no favors when displaying footage from the same games running on the PS5 Slim and the PS5 Pro.

As it turns out, Dealabs’ leak in late August regarding the design of the PS5 Pro was right on the money: the new version is extremely similar to the PS5 Slim, just taller because of the three black stripes on each side instead of the one present on the Slim. Yours truly incorrectly predicted that the PS5 Pro will be able to use the faceplates of the PS5 Slim (it will get its own at some point), but correctly predicted that it will be able to use the same optional optical disc drive, that it will come with 2TB of built-in SSD storage and that it will be able to display 8K content (Gran Turismo 7 seems to be the first title to offer such a mode).

The PS5 Pro will sport Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, which is faster and more reliable than Wi-Fi 6E, and it will come with a DualSense controller. It is fully compatible with every other accessory and peripheral Sony has released so far, including the PlayStation VR2, the PlayStation Portal, the DualSense Edge, the Access controller, the Pulse Elite and the Pulse Explore. Sony states that “the user interface and network services will also remain the same as PS5”, which is obviously to be expected.

What can this PS5 Pro do for people’s games, then?

In terms of specs, everything that has been gradually made public over the last few months regarding the PS5 Pro turned out to be true as well. The PS5 Pro is based on pretty much the same CPU (capable of operating at higher frequencies as needed) and a seriously upgraded GPU, both of which work with the same amount of unified memory (16GB) at a higher bandwidth. The CPU and GPU are helped by a powerful machine learning co-processor in order to deliver high-quality AI upscaling through Sony’s proprietary PSSR algorithm. All of the above result in an uplift of “up to” 45% in typical graphics rendering and an increase of over 200% in raytraced graphics rendering of modern games.

The PS5 Pro – according to the obligatory PlayStation blog post – will be offering a Game Boost function. This feature “can apply to more than 8.500 backward-compatible PS4 games and may stabilize or improve their performance”. An Enhanced Image Quality for PS4 games function will also be included in order “to improve the resolution of select PS4 games”. All PS4 game publishers, though, who would like to see their titles “automatically” improved by Game Boost and Enhanced Image Quality will have to update them accordingly (basically make said titles compatible with Sony’s latest game development libraries). It’s up to the publishers themselves, in other words, to “turn the switch” that will allow their older PS4 or PS5 games to be improved by the PS5 Pro. Yours truly expects many, but not all, to do that.

As it was previously rumored, all current PS5 games upgraded for free to take advantage of the Pro’s advanced features – so that they can improve on the resolution, frame rate, lighting effects etc. of the original versions – will be granted a “PS5 Pro Enhanced” label. Sony claims that over 50 such games will be updated for the PS5 Pro’s launch, including 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 among others.

What can Sony do to make a convincing case for the PS5 Pro?

There’s obviously no getting around the fact that $699/€799/£699 is a lot of money by gaming console standards. That price tag seems even heftier when taking into account the fact that this is a Digital Edition PS5 Pro, meaning that it does not include an optical disc drive (sold separately). The built-in 2TB SSD may soften the blow – getting an extra 1TB of internal SSD storage for the PS5 currently costs anything between one hundred and two hundred bucks – but it’s fair to say that $699 is more than what most people were hoping to pay for a PS5 Pro.

On the other hand, this wouldn’t exactly be a premium product in the first place if it cost much less than that – because that is precisely what Sony is going for with the PS5 Pro. This market positioning, though, creates a tricky situation for Sony. People who already own a PS5 and can easily afford the Pro will simply buy it so they can enjoy their favorite games in their absolute best form. People who just can’t afford a PS5 Pro will settle for a PS5 Slim, but it’s now Sony’s job to make them feel they are not second-class citizens in this generation of console gaming – especially given the fact that most future PS5 sales will still belong to the Slim model.

Both target groups are important and there’s a now delicate balance Sony needs to strike: that of getting people excited for the PS5 Pro without diminishing the value of the PS5 Slim. Then there will also be a number of people who currently do think that the PS5 Pro is expensive but maybe could stretch it as far as $799 for a new PS5… if they are convinced that it’s totally worth it. What these people want to see is meaningful, ideally exciting, PS5 Pro upgrades: tangible improvements that make an obvious difference, across a wide range of games old and new.

If Sony can offer that convincingly, then this new PS5 model should be off to a good start despite the hefty price tag. Will the company be able to pull that off by November 7th? Only a few weeks before we find out.