After months of rumors and speculation, Sony finally announced the PlayStation 5 Pro, a premium console with a premium price point for those players who want the best graphics possible.
Unlike the base PS5, the Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive and is a lot more expensive at $700. It’ll release ahead of the holiday season on November 7, 2024, with preorders opening up on September 26.
PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny introduced the console in a technical presentation, saying that the key goal with the PS5 Pro was to reduce the need for players to choose between performance and fidelity modes — or whether to focus on higher frame rates or graphics quality.
As with the PS4 Pro, which offered a more powerful GPU and other hardware to support higher-resolution graphics, the PS5 Pro mostly offers a spec bump for players who want the best graphical fidelity, with a larger GPU (67% more compute units than the regular PS5) that promises to produce 45% faster performance during play. The big addition here is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which uses machine learning to help target higher frame rates similar to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR. There is also “advanced” ray tracing, so expect more realistic lighting in the video games that support it.
None of this offers a huge improvement in the end, but playing games should feel smoother. And if you’re the kind of person who can tell the difference between 60 frames per second (fps) and anything lower, it’s something you’ll appreciate.
Some games will also now get an “enhanced” label to show they will get the most out of the PS5 Pro’s new hardware, including Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Gran Turismo 7, and many others. Do note that this doesn’t apply to all PS5 titles.
The PS5 Pro does feature “Game Boost,” which makes over 8,500 PS4 games playable on the new console, along with “Enhanced Image Quality” for PS4 titles to increase the resolution. Finally, it’ll include support for Wi-Fi 7 and 8K gaming.
But let’s get back to the eye-popping price. The PS5 Pro will retail for $700 (£700, €800, and ¥119,980). It’s around the same size as the current PS5, but it doesn’t come with a disc drive — you’ll have to pay $80 extra for one. Unlike the original PS5, the PS5 Pro also doesn’t come with a vertical stand. The new console does come with a DualSense controller (which just got a $5 increase), and a copy of Astro’s Playroom.
PlayStation announced the technical presentation on Monday. While it didn’t specify that it would focus on the PS5 Pro, there have been multiple leaks and reports over the past few months that signaled its official reveal. People even spotted that Sony may have dropped a little hint in the graphic for its 30th anniversary celebration. If you look closely on the right, you can see a dark rectangle with some diagonal lines in the middle — very much looking like the final product. There were also reports that dev kits were now in the hands of developers, as Sony wanted to make sure games were optimized for the PS5 Pro.
