After months of rumors and speculation, Sony finally announced the PlayStation 5 Pro, a premium console for those players who want the best graphics possible, along with its premium price point.
Unlike the base PS5, the Pro is a lot more expensive: $700. It’ll release ahead of the holiday season on November 7, 2024.
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 that’ll produce 45% faster performance. The big addition here is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, which uses machine learning to help target higher frame rates similar to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR. It also enhances 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. Some of the titles shown off during the presentation include Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and many others.
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 some leaked design renders. 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.
