Sony has officially confirmed its upcoming console, the PS5 Pro, via a short 9-minute presentation that was teased just yesterday. The console will mainly feature more powerful GPUs, and in PS5’s lead architect Mark Cerny’s words, “we want to give players the graphics that the game creators aspire to, at the high framerates that players typically prefer.”
PS5 Pro: Technical Details
Cerny noted that for the original PS5, games often has to resort to either fidelity or performance – you lose performance on fidelity, and you lose graphical quality if you want high framerates. Notably, “about three-quarters of the time” players prefer performance, which creates an imbalance that the PS5 Pro will seek to resolve.
This almost certainly sounds like a more powerful GPU is on the menu, and you’d be correct. Sony quoted several numbers, including 67% more Compute Units, 28% faster RAM, amounting up to 45% faster rendering; new ray tracing pipeline doubles or even triples the ray calculation speed of the PS5; and a new “custom hardware” for machine learning. Specifically, he’s referring to the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a feature that was leaked several months ago.
As a result, the PS5 Pro can maintain the 60FPS framerate at fidelity mode, and on the flip side, the new console can deliver noticeably sharper visuals when both consoles are targeting the same 60FPS framerate (where the original console needs to tone down its graphics to do so). Additionally, games like Gran Turismo 7 can now support ray-traced reflections in races thanks to more potent RT capabilities, and they will be labeled as “PS5 Pro Enhanced” for easy identification.
Images
Here are all the images and videos of the PS5 Pro in full detail:
Pricing
Pricing has been revealed as well, with a $699 price tag – a significant jump over the original console; no local pricing has been announced so far, but expect somewhere in the neighborhood of RM3,000 when it launches on November 7, 2024 globally, with pre-orders to begin on September 26, 2024.
For the price, you’ll be getting 2TB SSD, a DualSense wireless controller and a copy of Astro’s Playroom by default, though like the PS5 “Slim”, it’ll come in a disc-less form that allows you to install the optional disc drive at any time via a separate purchase (compatible for both models).
Pokdepinion: That is a pretty hefty price tag – but knowing its GPU hardware, I can see why it wouldn’t come cheap.
