After months of leaks, Sony today announced the Pro version of its PS5 gaming console during a special technical presentation. The new product will go on sale on November 7 at a price of $700. According to lead developer Mark Cerny, the PS5 Pro is superior to the original console in three key areas: a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and custom AI upscaling.
Image source: Sony
Externally, the PS5 Pro looks like the current version of the PS5 (aka PS5 Slim) – it has a similar design with divided side edges, but at the same time it is not equipped with a disk drive – the latter can be purchased separately. The main changes are on the inside: the PS5 Pro GPU contains 67% more compute units than the current PS5 console, and memory communication speed has increased by 28%. The increase in GPU performance will allow developers, according to Sony, to “use ray tracing at speeds that are double and sometimes triple that of the current PS5 console.”
The new product received an eight-core AMD Zen 2 processor with 16 threads and a frequency of 3.5 GHz, which can operate at speeds of up to 3.85 GHz. The GPU is built on the RDNA 3 architecture and has a performance of 33.5 Tflops – previously there was RDNA 2 and only 10.3 Tflops. The GDDR6 RAM remains the same at 16 GB, but its speed has increased to 18 Gbit/s (the regular model has 14 Gbit/s). SSD capacity has doubled to 2 TB.
According to Cerny, the hardware upgrades will result in a 45% increase in rendering speed and should improve detail and frame rates. Cerny claims that PS5 Pro will allow gamers to avoid sacrificing image quality for performance, while currently three-quarters of PS5 owners are forced to choose performance mode.
The PS5 Pro also gets Sony’s new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) AI-based upscaling feature, similar to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR. PSSR improves frame rates and image quality and is intended to replace existing implementations of temporal anti-aliasing or upsampling.
To optimize over 8,500 backwards compatible PS4 games, the new console offers Game Boost. “This feature may stabilize or improve the performance of supported PS4 and PS5 games,” explained Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s platform business group. “Resolution increases are also available for some PS4 games.”
PS5 Pro supports Wi-Fi 7 wireless connectivity, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and 8K resolution. Games will need to be patched to take advantage of some PS5 Pro features – Sony says developers are already preparing free software updates for existing games that will be labeled as PS5 Pro Enhanced games.
В число первых игр PS5 Pro Enhanced войдут 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 и The Last of Us Part II Remastered.