PS5 Pro – Everything we now know about the souped up PlayStation 5

After months and months of rumours and speculation, Sony has finally taken the wraps off the PlayStation 5 Pro, a mid-generation spec bump that aims to banish the choice between Fidelity mode and Performance modes. Here’s what we now know about the PS5 Pro.

PS5 Pro release date, price & pre-orders

One of the main things to know about the PS5 Pro is when it’s coming out and how much it will cost. The launch date for the PS5 Pro is set for 7th November 2024. Pre-orders will go live on 26th September 2024.

As for the cost, I hope you’ve been saving up, because it will set you back $700 / £700 /€800 / ¥120,000.

Note that this is a disc-less console at that price, with support for the optional UHD drive add-on debuted alongside the PS5 Slim. It’s also a horizontal console unless you fork out for a vertical stand.

A partial PS5 Pro spec sheet

Mark Cerny did not provide a full spec sheet, but this is an extension of the base PS5. In other words, it will still have the same 8 core Zen 2 CPU (potentially clocked a little bit higher), 16GB of RAM, us the Tempest 3D AudioTech engine, allow you to slot in an extra NVMe drive, and more. The console is roughly the same height as the original PS5, with the width of the PS5 Slim.

Here’s where it’s improved and upgraded:

The 67% increase in GPU compute units, fed by a 28% increase in RAM speed allows for roughly 45% increase in GPU performance. However, there’s much more to it than that.

The enhanced GPU also comes alongside improved ray-tracing that can offer 2-3x the performance of the base PS5. It’s not clear if this is entirely down to the GPU, or if it’s going hand-in-hand with the PSSR processor. Still, that’s quite an impressive bump.

But what does this all mean for your gaming?

Graphical improvements with PS5 Pro

Developers will be able to use all of this power in a number of ways. Mark Cerny stated that Sony’s goal was to effectively remove the need for graphics modes, so numerous games will be upgraded to provide Fidelity Mode graphics at Performance Mode frame rates – examples included The Last of Us Part 2, Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart.

Already performant games can alternatively push enhanced visual effects into the games. Gran Turismo 7, for example, will now be able to render ray-traced reflections during races, when these were previously limited to replays. This will likely be the new Fidelity vs. Performance mode toggle.

PS5 Pro game upgrades

The games already confirmed to have native PS5 Pro enhancements include:

• 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
• The Last of Us Part II Remastered

Going forward, enhanced games will be marked with a PS5 Pro Enhanced label.

PS5 Pro backward compatibility enhancements

PS5 Pro enhancements are not limited to games with native support and updates. The console is fully compatible to the library of PS5 and backward compatible PS4 games available on standard PS5, and you can leverage it in two ways:

• PS5 Pro Game Boost – this can be applied across all PS4 and PS5 games, using the GPU power to stabilise or improve performance of games, similar to the PS4 Pro Game Boost feature back in the day. With many games featuring dynamic resolution and now variable refresh rate modes, this will be a great de facto upgrade.
• Enhanced Image Quality – Available for “select PS4 games”, the PS5 Pro will seemingly be able to use PSSR to upscale the PS4 image to higher resolutions. This will be most useful for early generation PS4 games, which were not enhanced for PS4 Pro.

Sadly there doesn’t seem to be an effort to do Xbox-style game injection, which would have potentially been able to replace FSR and FSR 2 upscaling with PSSR, but it’s possible that this could be added in a firmware update.

via PS Blog