Sony has made its beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro console official, with a heavily upgraded GPU (it’s 67% bigger, with 45% more performance, and 2-3x the RT performance) priced at $699, launching November 7, 2024.
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Inside of the new PS5 Pro console you’ll get a 2TB SSD and a wireless DualSense controller, as well as a copy of Astro’s Playroom pre-installed on every PS5 Pro purchase. Sony is making its new PS5 Pro console available as a disc-less version, with the option to purchase the currently available Disc Drive for PS5 separately.
I’m sure we’re going to see an even more expensive PS5 Pro with a disc drive in the future (ready for GTA 6, of course, and probably bundled with a special PS5 Pro + GTA 6 bundle).
Sony didn’t go into great detail about the upgraded SoC, but on the GPU side of things we have a 67% increase in Compute Units (up to 60 CUs versus the 36 CUs inside of the standard PS5). We have a 28% increase in memory speed thanks to faster 18Gbps GDDR6 memory (16Gbps GDDR6 in the standard PS5) which delivers 576GB/sec of memory bandwidth, combined delivering 45% more performance.
The upgraded GPU features 45% more performance for regular games, but there are some major, major RT performance boosts for the new PS5 Pro. We’ve heard rumors that some of the RT performance magic is coming from the next-gen RDNA 4 GPU architecture, which is providing a mind-boggling 2-3x performance boost in RT games with the use of PSSR upscaling.
Speaking of PSSR — or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution — is Sony’s answer to AI-powered upscaling inside of the PS5 Pro. AMD uses its XDNA 2 — the same NPU inside of the new Strix Point APUs — to handle AI workloads on the PS5 Pro.
- Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine
- RT Instance Node Transform
- 64B RT Node
- Ray Tracing Tri-Pair Optimization
- Change flags encoded in barycentric to simplify the detection of procedural nodes
- BVH Footprint Improvement
- RT support for OBB and Instance Node Intersection
The skinny on Sony’s upgraded PS5 Pro console:
- PS5 Pro is 45% faster than standard PS5: The upgraded GPU inside of the PS5 Pro is 45% faster than the standard PS5, with the GPU being 67% bigger than the GPU inside of the standard PS5. There’s also 28% faster memory (18Gbps GDDR6) inside of the PS5 Pro.
- 2-3x faster in RT performance: An increase of 45% in performance over the standard PS5 is impressive, but the new RDNA 4 GPU tricks inside of the PS5 Pro will reportedly provide an insane 2-3x performance increase on new “PS5 Pro Enhanced” games on a PlayStation 5 Pro console.
- PSSR, an AI-powered upscaling tech for PS5 Pro: The new PS5 Pro console will have some AI technology (of course) which will power an exciting new AI upscaling technology: PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution — or PSSR — which means we’re going to see some of the best graphics (and performance) we’ve seen out of a console yet with the PS5 Pro.
- PS5 Pro Enhanced games: Sony will have a new “PS5 Pro Enhanced” label for games, which will see games using PSSR to upscale the resolution to 4K, a constant 60FPS, and then add or increase ray tracing effects and performance.