PS5 Pro: Sony's Powerful New Console Sparks Debate

PS5 Pro vs Xbox Series X: Which Console Should You Get?

When it comes to consoles, choices like the Sony PS5 and Xbox Series X are the first to come to mind. And while we have seen plenty of comparisons between them, the new PS5 Pro is the newest kid on the block. New and old gamers alike must already be wondering which team to join now that the Pro is here. Well, to guide you through this tough decision we decided to compare the PS5 Pro vs Xbox Series X on various metrics. Let's see which console comes out on top, shall we? When it comes to getting a console, the performance obviously comes first. Here are all the important performance comparisons between the PS5 Pro and the Xbox Series X. CPU We start by noticing that the new PS5 Pro has the same CPU as the base PS5. This means the console will not see much change in-game processing when it comes to CPU power. However, the PS5 Pro does come with a Boost Mode. This helps in giving the games a slightly higher performance upgrade. On the other hand, Xbox Series X already comes with a 3.8 GHz processor. Although both the consoles work on the same eight-core Zen 2 CPU, the Xbox Series X has a slight advantage on the CPU part, given you won't have to use any special mode. However, it will be hard to notice the CPU performance if the PS5 Pro is always running on Boost Mode. Hopefully, no burn damage will happen. GPU While the CPU performance is almost similar, the GPU is where PS5 Pro has been improved upon. While Sony claims the GPU got bumped with unknown specs, the PS5 Pro comes with 45% more rendering power. Moreover, the Pro variant of the Sony console has 67% more computing units than the current PS5. On the other hand, Xbox Series X runs on the old RDNA 2 architecture GPU. Despite that, the Xbox Series X already had an advantage over the base PS5 in terms of GPU performance as it runs on 12.155 TFLOPS. It is greater than the base PS5 10.23 TFLOPs already. However, since we don't have the exact numbers yet, there is a chance the PS5 Pro's metrics go much higher than this. As it stands right now, the Xbox Series X wins this one. RAM and Storage When it comes to memory and storage, PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X both have their pros and cons. In terms of RAM, the PlayStation 5 Pro runs 28% faster than the normal PS5. Although there are no numbers yet on the RAM size, we can expect little to no changes. On the other hand, the Xbox Series X has 16 GB GDDR6 RAM. So, the differences in the RAM section are not that significant. However, when it comes to storage the Xbox Series X has 1 TB NVME SSD. On the other hand, the PS5 Pro comes with a huge 2TB storage. Unfortunately, even the 2 TB Series X is cheaper than the PS5 Pro which still makes us pick the latter here. This is especially true when the Pro doesn't even have a disc drive. Raytracing and Upscaling While both the consoles support Raytracing, the Xbox Series X comes with its limitations. The PS5 Pro on the other hand now has improved Ray Tracing even compared to its older brother. With advanced Raytracing, the Pro gets accurate lighting and fidelity while not compromising on performance. Moreover, the PS5 Pro comes with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) that upscales games for a further boost in performance. Compared to the PlayStation 5 Pro, the Xbox Series X doesn't have much in the upscale department. Yes, it comes with a 4K upscale option but the quality is not as good as native 4K. We can say that in terms of performance, both might be ideal on upscale but the PS5 Pro retains the quality thanks to the AI Accelerator as it can support 4K@60Hz as well. PS5 Pro vs Xbox Series X: Games With the performance part out of the way, let us talk about the game library. If we start with Sony, the games running on it will be called PS5 Pro Enhanced Games. As of now we only have 13 games with the enhanced label. However, Sony already confirmed 30-40 titles are already being worked on. That might seem comparably low in terms of the Series X. The Xbox Series X currently has over 448 games if we exclude the backwards-compatible games. But there's a catch. If you compare it to the base PS5, it is quite low. Moreover, the Xbox exclusives are already making their way towards PS5. So, it is certain that some of the games will come with the enhanced label if not all. So, if you want to be part of the exclusive club, PlayStation still offers more value. Well, unless there are Xbox exclusives you want to try day one through game pass without spending big bucks on them. PS5 Pro vs Xbox Series X: Design In terms of design, it is a war between the sci-fi white vs the matte black. Although we have seen many new variants for the Series X, they mostly revolve around the black template. It does give a galaxy and space vibe when you have an Xbox Series X sitting at your gaming desk. The PS5 Pro, much like the base PS5, shines white plates with its signature three black stripes in the middle. The dimensions of the Xbox Series X are 5.9 in × 5.9 in × 11.9 in. Compared to this, the PlayStation 5 Pro is the same as the original PS5 standing at 15.4 in × 10.2 in × 4.1 in. So, it comes down to which color scheme you desire for your room if you are looking for the design. However, you must purchase a vertical stand for the PS5 Pro separately while the Series X can stand on its own. PS5 Pro vs Xbox Series X: Price Finally, we come to the most important factor. After all, it's the price that decides right. The older console Xbox Series X is $499.99 which might feel a bit much. However, given the console is quite old and was a bit better in terms of performance than the base PS5, it can still outshine it. Moreover, you can grab it for a cheaper price on sale given it has been a while since its launch. Despite being a new console with a lot of upgrades, the PS5 Pro comes at $699. The absurd PS5 Pro pricing is already trolled. Remember that it is just a digital-only device where you must buy a disc drive and vertical stand separately. This is definitely not cheap, given the amount of performance and other modifications it offers, the price is nowhere near justified. Verdict: Which One Should You Get? So, it all comes down to which console you should get now. Well, if I am honest, the PlayStation 5 Pro could be a good choice if it at least provided some upgrades on the hardware part for that price point. At such a ridiculous price, the console only offers AI Upscaling with 2 TB storage. That's about it. Compared to the Xbox Series X, it still performs great. Of course, you will not get enough exclusives on the Xbox with how Microsoft is shifting away from that notion. But So is Sony. We are already seeing PS exclusives coming to PC for larger profits. So, who knows if they arrive on the green side as well. But if you want a console that stands without a vertical stand purchase, has an inbuilt disc drive, and has 2 TB storage, then go for the Xbox Series X and save yourself $100. So, which console do you like more between the PS5 Pro and Xbox Series X? Tell us in the comments below.

PlayStation 5 Pro vs PlayStation 5: Breaking Down the Specs - IGN

At the PlayStation 5 Technical Presentation, we finally got a look at what the much-awaited PS5 Pro is going to look like. And much like the PS4 Pro before it, this mid-generation console refresh looks like it will push graphics fidelity to the next level. But how exactly does it compare to what came before? The PS5 launched back in 2020 with a custom AMD Zen 2 processor and RDNA 2 GPU, both of which were extremely similar to high-end PC specs of the day. A lot of time has passed, and while the PS5 Pro is still built on the same architectures, Sony has shown the GPU some love, greatly improving the amount of Compute Units (CUs) on offer, which will dramatically improve gaming performance, especially at higher resolutions. Sony hasn't exactly released detailed specs, but I've done some napkin math and have a pretty good idea of what the PS5 Pro's innards will look like. The PS5 Pro GPU is the star of the show. Right now, all signs are pointing to it being built on the same AMD RDNA 2 architecture as the original PS5, just with, well, more of it. When the PS5 came out in 2020, it had an RDNA 2 GPU with 36 compute units, making for 2,304 streaming multiprocessors (SMs). This put it on the level of a mid-range graphics card like the AMD Radeon RX 6700. It was an incredibly powerful graphics chip for its time, and was able to truly provide next-generation 4K gameplay without relying on as much checkerboard upscaling as the PS4 Pro before it. However, time continues its inevitible march forward, and newer games need a bit more horsepower, especially at 4K. Enter the PS5 Pro. This time around, Sony claims to have a GPU with 67% more compute units. Some light pocket math puts the new number of compute units at 60, and because RDNA 2 CUs feature 64 streaming multiprocessors, the new number is up at 3,840 SMs. That's a massive increase in silicon. To put that in perspective, that puts it - on paper - at the same level as the AMD Radeon RX 6800, a GPU that was actually capable of 4K gaming on PC. But it's more than just raw GPU silicon that was thrown into the PS5 Pro. According to a hands-on preview from CNET, Sony included next-generation ray tracing hardware from AMD, hardware that Cerny claims hasn't been released in one of Team Red's graphics cards. AMD has had problems keeping up with Nvidia in ray tracing performance, and this next generation hardware might help the PS5 Pro keep up with the growing demands that more advanced ray tracing effects have on hardware. This is definitely not a generational leap in GPU performance by any means - it's using the same generation of hardware after all. But the huge leap in silicon is appropriate for a mid-generation refresh and should provide much better performance when those 'fidelity modes' are enabled. Both Mark Cerny's presentation and the PlayStation Blog neglect to mention the SSD, so its safe to assume that the PS5 Pro will sport the same high-end SSD that powered the PS5 back in 2020. And while there certainly are faster drives these days, a PCIe 5.0 SSD wouldn't provide enough of a boost in loading times to make a significant difference, especially with how expensive those drives are. However, memory does see an uplift. The PS5 launched with 16GB of GDDR6 memory as unified system RAM. The PS5 Pro has the same capacity, but the speeds are increased, likely due to a better memory interface on the new GPU. Sony claims that the memory is about 28% faster, and my semi-reliable pencil math shows that will equal about 560GB/s of memory bandwidth, up from 440GB/s on the old PS5. Combined with the beefier GPU, this should really help the PS5 Pro hit the 45% performance increase Cerny kept repeating throughout the 10-minute presentation. It would have been nice to see more memory in the PS5 Pro, though, especially with how much focus is being paid to 4K gaming performance. After all, modern 4K graphics cards are launching with upwards of 20GB of memory, and that's RAM that's dedicated to the GPU alone. The PS5 came out when upscaling tech on PC was in its infancy. Nvidia's DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, had come out a couple years before and was still going through some serious learning pains. A lot has changed since then. Over the last couple of years, AI-based upscaling has proven to be a winning technology for PC games, so it's only natural that Sony would want in on that action. After all, most of the games Sony has shipped on PC have implemented DLSS or FSR (Fidelity Super Resolution, AMD's answer to DLSS) in one way or another. The original PS5, on the other hand, used the checkerboard-style upscaling pioneered with the PS4 Pro. This upscaling method is imperfect, but it allows Sony to push high-detail images at a high resolution without taking too much of a hit to performance. The same philosophy applies to the PS5 Pro, but instead of using a glorified filter to fill in missing pixels, it uses an AI algorithm that can more accurately calculate missing image information, without a massive loss in fidelity. However, with the PS5 being locked to AMD hardware, Sony had to come up with a bespoke neural engine in order to power the new PSSR - or PlayStation Spacial Super Resolution. The technical presentation didn't really offer any details on this neural engine, so I can't make any claims to its raw power. We don't know much about how PSSR will work quite yet, but I'm sure Sony will release more information on it over the coming months. Mark Cerny spent absolutely no time talking about the CPU in the PS5 Pro, so it's pretty safe to assume it's not changing. Not that the PS5 CPU is bad. It's still an 8-core Zen 2 processor, which is still more than enough for modern games. At higher resolutions, like what the PS5 Pro is clearly designed for, most of the work is going to rely on a strong graphics processor, rather than a CPU. The CPU just needs to coordinate things in the background and run physics calculations, which it can already do extremely quickly. For the purpose of playing graphically demanding games at a high resolution, the PS5 Pro is a huge upgrade, just in terms of raw GPU performance. That bigger GPU is then paired with specialized hardware for ray tracing and upscaling to further improve performance at 4K. We don't know much about these specialized parts yet, but it's definitely more than the base PS5 can offer. However, it's important to keep in mind that the new GPU is the equivalent of the AMD Radeon RX 6800, which you can find for about $350 right now, and is using a CPU and GPU architecture that's nearly five years old. The PS5 Pro is using this older hardware while still raising the price to $699, compared to the $499 that the PS5 launched at four years ago. I have no doubt in my mind that the PS5 Pro will deliver a more vivid and detailed gaming experience than the base PS5, but it won't be a generational uplift. Just a refined version of what already exists.

Exclusive Hands-On: I Played Sony's All-New PS5 Pro

Nearly 20 years writing about tech, and over a decade reviewing wearable tech, VR, and AR products and apps Sitting in front of an 80-inch TV playing Gran Turismo 7 is an immersive experience. It's even more realistic in 8K resolution. I'm not a good driver, but that's partly because I'm stunned by the clarity of the vistas in front of me. I'm also wowed by a new 4K ray-tracing mode that casts car reflections on other racers. It feels almost like I'm in VR without the headset. I'm at Sony's San Mateo PlayStation headquarters in a room full of TVs, all running demos of familiar games such as Ratchet and Clank and Spider-Man 2. They're playing on the new PlayStation 5 Pro, arriving Nov. 7 for $700 (£700). Mark Cerny, Sony's lead PlayStation system architect, guides me around the demos, pointing out the Pro upgrades compared to the standard PS5 on a side-by-side monitor. As I jump back and forth, I can see the difference. Everything is crisper, more fluid or both. I'd prefer to play on the PS5 Pro. But with a non-Pro PS5 available for $500 today, and likely less during upcoming holiday sales, I don't know if the sometimes subtle upgrades will be worth the price for many. The PS5 Pro is not the PlayStation 6, which likely won't be released for another three or four years, and it isn't for everyone. It's a big, graphically boosted piece of hardware that can keep up with ever-changing PCs, and in some ways maybe exceed them. The PS5 Pro is all about making big TV gaming a happier experience. A souped-up GPU promises more ray-tracing and fluid 4K and 60-frames-per-second gaming across the board for games that get Pro upgraded, and automatic AI upscaling for the rest of the PlayStation library. Oh, and expect a lot more ray-tracing, a fancy graphical technique to simulate light. Expect games to get Pro-upgraded performance extras -- Sony says about 40 to 50 games will get patches when the system launches in November. I played over half a dozen games on the PS5 Pro, and spoke with Cerny and Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment's Platform Business Group. We talked about what the upgrade means for PlayStation's gaming future, and what to expect next. I was shocked that the PS5 Pro wasn't a hulking beast. The console's contours are nearly the same as the original PS5, and it's actually smaller. Meanwhile the "Slim" PS5, released last year, is definitely smaller than the Pro but the difference in size isn't massive. The biggest external differences, teased in Sony's 30th anniversary logo, are the diagonal black ribbed vents across the center. (These mean the Pro is incompatible with existing PS5 console covers.) The back also has an extra USB-C port instead of USB-A. But the PS5 Pro should slot into similar shelving to your older PS5, unlike the chunkier PS4 Pro released in 2016, and of course you can mount the Pro vertically on the optional $30 stand if you prefer. Also an Apple fan? Here's the iPhone 16 pricing, sale date and preorder info you're looking for. The Pro comes with the same DualSense controller as the PS5 -- no upgrades there. (A step-up DualSense Edge controller already exists.) The Pro doesn't have an optical disc drive, though. Instead, there's a larger 2TB solid state drive, plus the same support for expanded M2 SSDs. You can attach an optical drive separately, though, the same ones that work on the new-design PS5 models. You could detach one of those or buy a new one. Not having an included optical drive standard feels like a statement that downloadable games are now the standard, and the Pro's bumped-up Wi-Fi 7 support should make for faster downloads if your router supports it. Everything the PS5 Pro offers is about graphics. The CPU is the same as the PS5, and so is the SSD speed. The GPU, meanwhile, has 67% more computing cores, according to Sony, with 28% faster RAM and 45% faster rendering. There are three big initial upgrades Sony is specifically pushing on the Pro for what that new GPU is doing: more ray tracing, automatic AI-assisted game upscaling for 4K and a new Pro mode for games that will combine 60fps and 4K together. An AI-assisted upscaling mode, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, works across the whole game library without any needed patch, adding in details to upscale to 4K. I didn't see this demonstrated, but the feature should help enhance older games if you have a 4K TV. It'll also work on PSVR 2 games in the future, too, Cerny said. The planned 40 to 50 games that get PS5 Pro upgrades at the hardware's Nov. 7 launch will focus on 4K and 60fps upgrades across the board, but also have a laundry list of other graphics boosts including new volumetric lighting and effects, richer graphics, more on-screen background characters, and modes that can ramp up to 120fps or 8K gaming. I played Gran Turismo 7 in an 8K mode and a 4K mode that added all sorts of extra ray-tracing effects. Much like PC games, Cerny said the Pro could spark a range of extra gaming modes. TVs with variable refresh rates that can range from 40 to 120 fps are going to work with the PS5 Pro, Cerny adds, because games will automatically get frame rate improvements without an upgrade patch. But dedicated 120 fps modes will come too. Cerny said over 25% of PS5 owners own 120 fps-capable TVs, while around 1 in 10 PS5 players have variable refresh rate TVs. Gaming in 8K is a fun extra, but it's available to an even smaller subset of existing PS5 gamers, since 8K TVs are even less common. "I've already seen games with three different PS5 Pro modes," Cerny said of the lineup of games upgraded for the launch. "As time goes by, particularly for the games which are launching after the hardware releases, we'll increasingly see a more nuanced approach, where the focus is less on resolution, and much more about higher image quality through a variety of strategies." Cerny said the process of porting over PC games is easier than it was on the PlayStation 4 Pro. He sees the PS5 Pro, much like the PS5 with its ultrafast onboard SSD, as leading the way for future gaming trends. "PS5 Pro uses the new advanced [ray tracing] feature sets that AMD created as the next step in their roadmap architecture," Cerny told me. "But if you look around, there are no other AMD GPUs that use it yet. We motivated the development, and I'm very happy we did so -- the response from the developers has been extraordinarily great." Cerny also sees the continuing overlap between console and PC gaming, including many of Sony's PlayStation 5 games already being available on PC, as a bonus. "It's specifically helping us with PS5 Pro because the games are on high-end PCs, so they can look at what they did for the several-thousand-dollar PCs and then pick and choose what they want to bring to PS5 Pro." I hopped around several TV stations in a single room, trying out snippets of PS5 games with early versions of Pro upgrades. Sony didn't allow CNET's video team to directly capture footage from the Pro to show the advantages, perhaps because the game updates might still change before November release. I got to play PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of six games side by side on two identical 4K TVs, and I also played a couple of games on a much larger 80-inch 8K TV, too. Many of the games I played, including Horizon: Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, focused specifically on how the new, best-of-both-worlds 4K/60fps Pro mode felt to play. Answer: It feels great. Just running through the grass in the The Last of Us, or looking out at waterfalls in Horizon, was lovely. Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank just felt a lot better to play at smoother, higher frame rates on a big canvas. That said, many of the upgrades were on the subtle side. Sometimes I had to stop and check side by side to appreciate the difference. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in particular popped compared to the fuzzier graphics on the existing PS5 version. Everything was sharper, and still 60fps smooth. It felt like putting new glasses on. My demo of F1 24 showed new ray tracing effects during a rainy race, which made the track and environment feel more photorealistic. Rain on the pavement reflected the car and the sky, and glass walls near me showed the stands across the road. Gran Turismo 7 was maybe the most stunning demo of all, because it added two new modes. 8K gameplay on an 80-inch screen made me wonder how this could be used for sim racing setups with massive displays. Ray tracing, finally added into GT7's gameplay in another 4K mode, made crowded races with cars feel even more real. I was so hypnotized by looking at car finishes that I kept crashing. Four years after the PS5 debuted in the middle of a pandemic, time seems to have flown. But right now is actually past time for when Sony tends to release midcycle console upgrades. The PlayStation 4 Pro arrived three years after the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 5 debuted four years after that. By that math, maybe the PS6 could come four years from now. Consoles aren't at a "next-gen" point yet, but who knows if they'll ever be. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its subscription library running everywhere, game streaming is continuing to spread, and smaller PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck are reinventing ways to play games, and rediscovering what consoles can be. Sony has opened many of its games onto PC, so there are already a bunch of PlayStation gamers who don't have a PlayStation at all. PC gaming, which Sony is increasingly involved in -- lots of flagship first-party games coming to Steam, and the PlayStation VR 2 now having its own PC adapter -- is a landscape of perpetual change. There are already plenty of games that can optimize to many GPUs and displays: It's expected. To a PC gaming crowd, a PS5 Pro may or may not seem appealing. But for someone who wants to play bleeding-edge games with stepped-up graphics on their own amazing TV, the PS5 Pro looks like exactly the step-up splurge. I'll admit, I was a little surprised at first that the PS5 Pro demos I saw were all of established PS5 games, with no new and exciting content in sight. But that's part of the point of the Pro: It's a performance upgrade to the same platform, not a whole new console. That should be comforting to existing PS5 owners, because a lot of them probably don't need the upgrade. And yet, 4K 60 fps gaming is so tempting if you have the display for it. In all the demos I tried, I found myself wondering if I'd just want to play everything in this mode and never look back. It was hard to return to 30 fps gaming on some of the PS5's fastest-paced games like Ratchet & Clank or Spider-Man 2. I know a lot of multiplatform gamers, and I wonder if the expectations for Sony are that their own gamers will increasingly be that way too. "I think multidevice players are growing, but it's not a significant portion from the PlayStation console community point of view at this moment. But I think more customers want to kind of play on multiple devices, so that will grow," Nishino said. As CNET's resident VR expert, I'm curious what the PS5 Pro can do for the PlayStation VR 2, although Sony's support for the headset has been underwhelming lately. Cerny said the Pro will allow higher-resolution games on the PSVR 2 thanks to the GPU boost and eventually a tuning of Sony's AI upscaling that will work with all VR games. But no specific PSVR 2 upgraded games have been announced yet, and I wonder what those improvements would even feel like. (I mentioned to Cerny and Nishino that I'd still love to see original PSVR games like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, which are incompatible with PSVR 2, to get ports that still haven't happened yet. I didn't get a response to that comment.) I also wonder about other peripherals to come. The PlayStation Portal, released last fall, enables remote PS5 gaming in a handheld form, but it's dependent on Wi-Fi speeds, which can affect performance. Would a PS5 Pro improve future wireless handheld accessories? According to Sony, over 60% of Portal owners are new to remote play, despite existing streaming solutions for remote play being available before on phone and tablet apps. A Portal successor might be in Sony's future, perhaps one with Wi-Fi 7. A $700 midcycle upgrade console like the PS5 Pro isn't an expense most people will be up for, especially since the original PS5 is still a perfectly good game console. Sony seems to be ready for this reality, and Cerny and Nishino acknowledged that previous console upgrades have also been big draws for newcomers to PlayStation, too. A significant percentage of PS4 Pro buyers were new customers, according to Sony, and the same is true for PS5. That suggests a new wave of would-be PS5 gamers might come aboard with the Pro. "Most markets have a pro model, so in that respect, consoles are just the same; it might just be that their addressable market is not as big as that of phones or PCs," Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said of the PS5 Pro. "According to Sony, there is not much of a lift required for games to run on the Pro, taking advantage of the new specs. Console vs. PC should be more of a question of preference than of priority. The experience is not better. It is just different." In that sense, the PS5 Pro might be seen as a console alternative to gaming PCs. In 2024, PC gaming expectations are greater than they were four years ago, and the PS5 Pro can keep up with how games are already being upgraded. I wouldn't want to upgrade from a PS5 right now myself, but if I were getting a PS5 for the first time I'd strongly consider the Pro for any TV upgrades I make in the future.

PS5 Pro Hands-On: Sony's $700 Turbo Console Hits in November

Nearly 20 years writing about tech, and over a decade reviewing wearable tech, VR, and AR products and apps Sitting in front of an 80-inch TV playing Gran Turismo 7 is an immersive experience. It's even more realistic in 8K resolution. I'm not a good driver, but that's partly because I'm stunned by the clarity of the vistas in front of me. I'm also wowed by a new 4K ray-tracing mode that casts car reflections on other racers. It feels almost like I'm in VR without the headset. I'm at Sony's San Mateo PlayStation headquarters in a room full of TVs, all running demos of familiar games such as Ratchet and Clank and Spider-Man 2. They're playing on the new PlayStation 5 Pro, arriving Nov. 7 for $700 in the US. Mark Cerny, Sony's lead PlayStation system architect, guides me around the demos, pointing out the Pro upgrades compared to the standard PS5 on a side-by-side monitor. As I jump back and forth, I can see the difference. Everything is crisper, more fluid or both. I'd prefer to play on the PS5 Pro. But with a non-Pro PS5 available for $500 today, and likely less during upcoming holiday sales, I don't know if the sometimes subtle upgrades will be worth the price for many. The PS5 Pro is not the PlayStation 6, which likely won't be released for another three or four years, and it isn't for everyone. It's a big, graphically boosted piece of hardware that can keep up with ever-changing PCs, and in some ways maybe exceed them. The PS5 Pro is all about making big TV gaming a happier experience. A souped-up GPU promises more ray-tracing and fluid 4K and 60-frames-per-second gaming across the board for games that get Pro upgraded, and automatic AI upscaling for the rest of the PlayStation library. Oh, and expect a lot more ray-tracing, a fancy graphical technique to simulate light. Expect games to get Pro-upgraded performance extras -- Sony says about 40 to 50 games will get patches when the system launches in November. I played over half a dozen games on the PS5 Pro, and spoke with Cerny and Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment's Platform Business Group. We talked about what the upgrade means for PlayStation's gaming future, and what to expect next. I was shocked that the PS5 Pro wasn't a hulking beast. The console's contours are nearly the same as the original PS5, and it's actually smaller. Meanwhile the "Slim" PS5, released last year, is definitely smaller than the Pro but the difference in size isn't massive. The biggest external differences, teased in Sony's 30th anniversary logo, are the diagonal black ribbed vents across the center. (These mean the Pro is incompatible with existing PS5 console covers.) The back also has an extra USB-C port instead of USB-A. But the PS5 Pro should slot into similar shelving to your older PS5, unlike the chunkier PS4 Pro released in 2016, and of course you can mount the Pro vertically on the included base if you prefer. The Pro comes with the same DualSense controller as the PS5 -- no upgrades there. (A step-up DualSense Edge controller already exists.) The Pro doesn't have an optical disc drive, though. Instead, there's a larger 2TB solid state drive, plus the same support for expanded M2 SSDs. You can attach an optical drive separately, though, the same ones that work on the new-design PS5 models. You could detach one of those or buy a new one. Not having an included optical drive standard feels like a statement that downloadable games are now the standard, and the Pro's bumped-up Wi-Fi 7 support should make for faster downloads if your router supports it. Everything the PS5 Pro offers is about graphics. The CPU is the same as the PS5, and so is the SSD speed. The GPU, meanwhile, is 67% more computing cores, according to Sony, with 28% faster RAM and 45% faster rendering. There are three big initial upgrades Sony is specifically pushing on the Pro for what that new GPU is doing: more ray tracing, automatic AI-assisted game upscaling for 4K and a new Pro mode for games that will combine 60fps and 4K together. An AI-assisted upscaling mode, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, works across the whole game library without any needed patch, adding in details to upscale to 4K. I didn't see this demonstrated, but the feature should help enhance older games if you have a 4K TV. It'll also work on PSVR 2 games in the future, too, Cerny said. The planned 40 to 50 games that get PS5 Pro upgrades at the hardware's Nov. 7 launch will focus on 4K and 60fps upgrades across the board, but also have a laundry list of other graphics boosts including new volumetric lighting and effects, richer graphics, more on-screen background characters, and modes that can ramp up to 120fps or 8K gaming. I played Gran Turismo 7 in an 8K mode and a 4K mode that added all sorts of extra ray-tracing effects. Much like PC games, Cerny said the Pro could spark a range of extra gaming modes. TVs with variable refresh rates that can range from 40 to 120 fps are going to work with the PS5 Pro, Cerny adds, because games will automatically get frame rate improvements without an upgrade patch. But dedicated 120 fps modes will come too. Cerny said over 25% of PS5 owners own 120 fps-capable TVs, while around 1 in 10 PS5 players have variable refresh rate TVs. Gaming in 8K is a fun extra, but it's available to an even smaller subset of existing PS5 gamers, since 8K TVs are even less common. "I've already seen games with three different PS5 Pro modes," Cerny said of the lineup of games upgraded for the launch. "As time goes by, particularly for the games which are launching after the hardware releases, we'll increasingly see a more nuanced approach, where the focus is less on resolution, and much more about higher image quality through a variety of strategies." Cerny said the process of porting over PC games is easier than it was on the PlayStation 4 Pro. He sees the PS5 Pro, much like the PS5 with its ultrafast onboard SSD, as leading the way for future gaming trends. "PS5 Pro uses the new advanced [ray tracing] feature sets that AMD created as the next step in their roadmap architecture," Cerny told me. "But if you look around, there are no other AMD GPUs that use it yet. We motivated the development, and I'm very happy we did so -- the response from the developers has been extraordinarily great." Cerny also sees the continuing overlap between console and PC gaming, including many of Sony's PlayStation 5 games already being available on PC, as a bonus. "It's specifically helping us with PS5 Pro because the games are on high-end PCs, so they can look at what they did for the several-thousand-dollar PCs and then pick and choose what they want to bring to PS5 Pro." I hopped around several TV stations in a single room, trying out snippets of PS5 games with early versions of Pro upgrades. Sony didn't allow CNET's video team to directly capture footage from the Pro to show the advantages, perhaps because the game updates might still change before November release. I got to play PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of six games side by side on two identical 4K TVs, and I also played a couple of games on a much larger 80-inch 8K TV, too. Many of the games I played, including Horizon: Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, focused specifically on how the new, best-of-both-worlds 4K/60fps Pro mode felt to play. Answer: It feels great. Just running through the grass in the The Last of Us, or looking out at waterfalls in Horizon, was lovely. Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank just felt a lot better to play at smoother, higher frame rates on a big canvas. That said, many of the upgrades were on the subtle side. Sometimes I had to stop and check side by side to appreciate the difference. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in particular popped compared to the fuzzier graphics on the existing PS5 version. Everything was sharper, and still 60fps smooth. It felt like putting new glasses on. My demo of F1 24 showed new ray tracing effects during a rainy race, which made the track and environment feel more photorealistic. Rain on the pavement reflected the car and the sky, and glass walls near me showed the stands across the road. Gran Turismo 7 was maybe the most stunning demo of all, because it added two new modes. 8K gameplay on an 80-inch screen made me wonder how this could be used for sim racing setups with massive displays. Ray tracing, finally added into GT7's gameplay in another 4K mode, made crowded races with cars feel even more real. I was so hypnotized by looking at car finishes that I kept crashing. Four years after the PS5 debuted in the middle of a pandemic, time seems to have flown. But right now is actually past time for when Sony tends to release midcycle console upgrades. The PlayStation 4 Pro arrived three years after the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 5 debuted four years after that. By that math, maybe the PS6 could come four years from now. Consoles aren't at a "next-gen" point yet, but who knows if they'll ever be. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its subscription library running everywhere, game streaming is continuing to spread, and smaller PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck are reinventing ways to play games, and rediscovering what consoles can be. Sony has opened many of its games onto PC, so there are already a bunch of PlayStation gamers who don't have a PlayStation at all. PC gaming, which Sony is increasingly involved in -- lots of flagship first-party games coming to Steam, and the PlayStation VR 2 now having its own PC adapter -- is a landscape of perpetual change. There are already plenty of games that can optimize to many GPUs and displays: It's expected. To a PC gaming crowd, a PS5 Pro may or may not seem appealing. But for someone who wants to play bleeding-edge games with stepped-up graphics on their own amazing TV, the PS5 Pro looks like exactly the step-up splurge. I'll admit, I was a little surprised at first that the PS5 Pro demos I saw were all of established PS5 games, with no new and exciting content in sight. But that's part of the point of the Pro: It's a performance upgrade to the same platform, not a whole new console. That should be comforting to existing PS5 owners, because a lot of them probably don't need the upgrade. And yet, 4K 60 fps gaming is so tempting if you have the display for it. In all the demos I tried, I found myself wondering if I'd just want to play everything in this mode and never look back. It was hard to return to 30 fps gaming on some of the PS5's fastest-paced games like Ratchet & Clank or Spider-Man 2. I know a lot of multiplatform gamers, and I wonder if the expectations for Sony are that their own gamers will increasingly be that way too. "I think multidevice players are growing, but it's not a significant portion from the PlayStation console community point of view at this moment. But I think more customers want to kind of play on multiple devices, so that will grow," Nishino said. As CNET's resident VR expert, I'm curious what the PS5 Pro can do for the PlayStation VR 2, although Sony's support for the headset has been underwhelming lately. Cerny said the Pro will allow higher-resolution games on the PSVR 2 thanks to the GPU boost and eventually a tuning of Sony's AI upscaling that will work with all VR games. But no specific PSVR 2 upgraded games have been announced yet, and I wonder what those improvements would even feel like. (I mentioned to Cerny and Nishino that I'd still love to see original PSVR games like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, which are incompatible with PSVR 2, to get ports that still haven't happened yet. I didn't get a response to that comment.) I also wonder about other peripherals to come. The PlayStation Portal, released last fall, enables remote PS5 gaming in a handheld form, but it's dependent on Wi-Fi speeds, which can affect performance. Would a PS5 Pro improve future wireless handheld accessories? According to Sony, over 60% of Portal owners are new to remote play, despite existing streaming solutions for remote play being available before on phone and tablet apps. A Portal successor might be in Sony's future, perhaps one with Wi-Fi 7. A $700 midcycle upgrade console like the PS5 Pro isn't an expense most people will be up for, especially since the original PS5 is still a perfectly good game console. Sony seems to be ready for this reality, and Cerny and Nishino acknowledged that previous console upgrades have also been big draws for newcomers to PlayStation, too. A significant percentage of PS4 Pro buyers were new customers, according to Sony, and the same is true for PS5. That suggests a new wave of would-be PS5 gamers might come aboard with the Pro. "Most markets have a pro model, so in that respect, consoles are just the same; it might just be that their addressable market is not as big as that of phones or PCs," Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said of the PS5 Pro. "According to Sony, there is not much of a lift required for games to run on the Pro, taking advantage of the new specs. Console vs. PC should be more of a question of preference than of priority. The experience is not better. It is just different." In that sense, the PS5 Pro might be seen as a console alternative to gaming PCs. In 2024, PC gaming expectations are greater than they were four years ago, and the PS5 Pro can keep up with how games are already being upgraded. I wouldn't want to upgrade from a PS5 right now myself, but if I were getting a PS5 for the first time I'd strongly consider the Pro for any TV upgrades I make in the future.

The PS5 Pro is the wrong price at the wrong time | Digital Trends

The PlayStation 5 had barely touched down on shelves in 2020 when players began begging for a Pro model. That was a testament to the success of the PS4 Pro in 2016, which successfully made the case for a mid-generation console upgrade. It increased the console's power significantly, giving players a reason to upgrade ahead of major titles like Horizon Zero Dawn. It makes perfect sense that Sony would want to repeat that trick with the PS5. Considering the years of hype, the grand reveal likely didn't go as well as Sony hoped. Recommended Videos PlayStation's Mark Cerny revealed the PS5 Pro in a nine-minute presentation on Tuesday that highlighted the new console's upgraded GPU, AI-driven upscaling tech, and more. It all sounded great until the final moments revealed a whopping price tag: $700. The high cost now casts the anticipated console -- and the entire PS5 generation -- in a new light. Has Sony done enough over the past four years to convince players that the PS5 Pro is a smart investment? Technical enthusiasts may be convinced, but it's going to be a very hard sell for most players. Wrong price In a vacuum, the PS5 Pro is a perfectly good idea. Sony's nine-minute presentation made a fine case for the upgrade mostly thanks to its AI upscaling tech, which brings the best feature of modern PC gaming to a home console. The core selling point here is that the PS5 Pro will no longer force players to choose between Graphics and Performance Mode if they want the highest-quality visuals running at 60 frames per second. Considering that this console generation has struggled to deliver consistent frame rates, the new console solves a major problem. The caveat to all of that is price. The console will retail at $700. That's $300 more than the PS4 Pro cost in 2016. To make matters worse, it will be digital only. If you want to buy an attachable disc drive, that'll cost you another $80. It doesn't come with a vertical stand either, so players who want to replace their current PS5 might be looking at over $800. The cost eclipses every other console on the market today -- it's even pricier than the most expensive Steam Deck OLED model you can buy. PS5 Technical Presentation hosted by Mark Cerny For the techiest players out there who are used to spending thousands on PC parts, the price tag will feel worth it. Digital Trends' Jacob Roach argues that $700 is a fairly reasonable price when comparing it to similarly powered PCs. He's right, and Sony is undoubtedly catering to PC players who think like that with this release. It's targeting a niche; I imagine no one at Sony is expecting this to sell like a Nintendo Switch. Sony's reveal stream struggled to sell that idea, though. While Mark Cerny gave an elegant explanation of the Pro's improved tech, a compressed YouTube stream made it hard to tell the difference between games running on a base PS5 and the Pro model. With few other tangible improvements to sell it, I can imagine many players walking away from the stream struggling to spot the differences. A bold price tag requires a perfect sales pitch, and Sony missed the mark in its grand reveal. Even if the math works in its favor, it'll be an uphill struggle to convince buyers of that. Wrong time Even for those who see the value in the tech, there's one big sticking point: games. The PS5 generation has been a strange one for Sony when it comes to delivering a consistent stream of software. When the PS4 Pro launched, players had an enormous library of first-party games that would benefit from it on day one. It also had plenty of big titles on the horizon. Horizon Zero Dawn, Gravity Rush 2, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy were all incoming in 2017. 2018 would continue that momentum with God of War, Marvel's Spider-Man, a Shadow of the Colossus remake, and more. It made perfect sense to upgrade in 2016 as it felt like the PS4 was only getting started when it came to games. The PS5 does not have that same luxury. The first four years of the console's life have been hit and miss. Spider-Man 2, God of War Ragnarok, and Horizon Forbidden West have all been tentpole games in the past four years, but the list of must-own exclusives that could benefit from a technical leap stalls from there. Sony has slowed its once constant first-party output to a steady trickle in the PS5 era, with only two or three major releases in a year. This year has given us the fantastic Astro Bot and the surprise success of Helldivers 2, but there are few reasons to run out and pick up a PS5 outside of that. In fact, the PS5 Pro will not get any form of first-party launch game when it launches on November 7. The closest thing it'll have is an Until Dawn remake that launches in early October. That wouldn't be a problem if Sony had some big games on the horizon that justified an upgrade. That's not the case. We're largely in the dark about what's in development for PS5 at the moment. We know that Insomniac has several titles in the works, including Marvel's Wolverine, but nothing firm has been announced about any other primary PlayStation franchises. Anyone who comes to PlayStation for the kind of high-quality single player games that the PS4 was known for doesn't have a reason to upgrade right now. Naturally, there's more to PS5's library beyond first-party releases, as hits like Black Myth: Wukong have shown us. For a player who owns a PS5 less for exclusives and more just to play games without the mess of a PC, there will be plenty of games that will take advantage of the tech (Grand Theft Auto 6 is the biggest system seller there is). But at a $700 price point, players need to start weighing their purchases a bit more carefully. Does it make sense to upgrade to a PS5 Pro to play those games, or would it make more sense in the long run to build a comparable PC? What makes the proposition more challenging is that it's happening amid a major change in strategy. Sony is currently aiming its sights on live service multiplayer games, which are likely to fill up the last years of the PS5's life. Bungie will roll out Marathon and Haven Studios is working on Fairgames, both of which could serve as Sony's primary releases in 2025. The problem? Players don't have enough reasons to trust that vision yet. While Helldivers 2 is a hit, the disastrous Concord was taken offline in just two weeks. If you shell out for a PS5 Pro this year, there's a chance that you'll be using it on an untested live service strategy that's off to a rocky start. The PS5 Pro's biggest foe right now is hubris. Sony is pricing its console as if the PS5 is currently sitting on top of the world, just as the PS4 was in 2016. That's a gulf between those generations, though -- and it's not just $300 wide. The PS5 is a black box at this moment. We're living reveal stream to reveal stream as Sony dribbles out new game announcements with little runway. A console like the PS5 Pro is built to push its predecessor's momentum, and that's the exact thing Sony is lacking. Maybe its plans will suddenly accelerate in the next year. Just because we don't know what games are coming doesn't mean that we're not in for a more loaded 2025 than we're expecting. But $700 is a lot to spend on faith.

Will PS5 Pro Run GTA 6 at 4K60? Probably Not, Say the Experts - IGN

IGN quiz tech specialists Digital Foundry about if the PS5 Pro is really everything Sony says it is. The PS5 Pro is now a fast-approaching reality. The $700 mid-generation upgrade arrives on November 7, approximately a year in advance of the game that will likely push the four-years-old base PS5 to its very limits: Grand Theft Auto 6. But how essential will the PS5 Pro be to enjoying GTA 6 at its very best? It's a question more complicated than it first seems. "I think there's good evidence to suggest that the [GTA 6 trailer from last year] was running on either PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X," says Richard Leadbetter, technology editor at Digital Foundry. As such, the impressive level of graphical detail seen in that trailer should be achievable using the power of the original 2020 model PlayStation 5. It stands to reason, then, that the new PS5 Pro will be more than capable of delivering what we saw in that short glimpse of Vice City. Frame rates, though, are an entirely different thing. When asked if GTA 6 could realistically run at 60 frames-per-second on the PS5 Pro, Leadbetter is blunt in his analysis: "No. Grand Theft Auto games have always run complex simulations that push the CPU hard, which is why every GTA game has initially launched on their target platforms at 30fps (or lower!). "The PS5 Pro uses the same CPU as the PS5 and it would be extremely challenging to hit 60fps if the base PS5 version is targeting 30fps," he explains. "This isn't a GPU problem, it's a CPU problem." There's a multitude of simulation work running concurrently and constantly in GTA to keep its open world ticking. Every street is, at the very minimum, a stage for complex traffic and pedestrian simulations - AI routines and physics calculations that bring those roads and sidewalks to life. GTA 6 will very likely feature one of the most realistic depictions of city life we've seen in a video game, and so will be significantly taxing on the CPU as it renders all sorts of NPC behaviours. That leaves little bandwidth to boost those frame rates. Still, thanks to the PS5 Pro's other enhancements, GTA 6 will undoubtedly look better on the new console. It just likely will not be the 4K 60fps experience many will be expecting following Sony's boastful presentation. "What you will get will be higher quality visuals, but likely still running at similar frame-rates [to the base console]," says Leadbetter. "If GTA 6 can't sustain a locked 30fps (GTA 4 and GTA 5 couldn't on PS3 and Xbox 360), PS5 Pro can run the CPU with a 10 percent bump to clock speeds - so you may get more stable performance. "Of course, all bets are off if Rockstar is targeting 60fps on the standard PS5 - but we've seen no evidence so far to suggest it is." While it seems unlikely that the PS5 Pro will run GTA 6 at 4K 60fps, there's still reason to believe the new console will prove an impressive machine. Right now, though, there's little evidence of its transformative abilities. "I think the hardware's certainly capable, but the actual presentation confused me," says Leadbetter. "Nine minutes just isn't really enough to describe in depth the features the machine has and the philosophy behind the design." Leadbetter also notes that the games showcased during the presentation were already fantastic graphical showcases in their original forms, and so were not ideal demonstrations of the Pro's machine learning-based upscaling technology. Why was it the already gorgeous Horizon Forbidden West and Spider-Man 2 being shown off when we could have seen how transformative PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution could be for games that have shaky image quality on the standard PS5? "Combine that with poor presentational techniques and YouTube's inadequacies as a video delivery platform and you didn't see much of an improvement," says Leadbetter. While Sony has chosen to so far only preview enhancements to games that barely require them in the first place, we can at least be relatively confident that those titles in desperate need of a performance boost will be catered for. The PlayStation Blog states that up to 8,500 games will be improved thanks to the PS5 Pro Game Boost feature. "I think [the improvements will] be quite cool actually, assuming the extra 45 percent of GPU power is fully available to existing games," enthuses Leadbetter. "Many titles have dynamic resolution scaling. You should see clear image quality improvements there. Similarly, a lot of games have frame-rate issues in their 60fps performance modes - I'd expect those to be cleaned up. We might even finally get Elden Ring locked to 60 frames per second." One thing Leadbetter thinks is less likely to make an impact is the Pro's 8K capabilities. While he foresees a very small number of tech-focused developers, like Gran Turismo 7 creator Polyphony Digital, making 8K resolution options available for PS5 Pro, he doubts other studios will work on such modes "because the audience out there is vanishingly small." "I had an 8K screen for four years, but even as an RTX 4090 owner, I have little interest in 8K gaming when high frame-rates at max 4K are so much more desirable," he says. Talking of Nvidia's RTX graphics cards, PC gaming has been the much-debated topic following Sony's reveal of the PS5 Pro's eye-watering $699.99 price tag. I've seen several suggestions across social media that it's better value to just save up a 'little extra' money and buy a PC that will prove more powerful than the PS5 Pro. It's an argument I personally think is flawed - a strong 4K, high frame-rate PC will set you back notably more money than the cost of the new console. And, when it's built, it simply won't be capable of doing the thing many prospective PS5 Pro owners want: playing GTA 6 at launch with the best possible graphics. (GTA 6 will ship on console first, remember.) Leadbetter has a similar outlook. "You will struggle to get that kind of visual quality on a similarly priced PC," he says. "The closest GPU on the market now with that kind of feature set and performance is the RTX 4070 - which is a fair bit better, I'd say. But your base cost there is $540/£480. And then you need to factor in CPU, motherboard, memory, storage, power supply and case. "You could offset the extra cost against the fact that you don't need extra subscription costs over time, I suppose, but I think you're missing the fundamental point of what PS5 Pro is and who is going to buy it. "It's a console, not a PC - and there are still key differences there, not least in a viable living room experience. I'd also say the Pro is designed to appeal to core PlayStation users with a library built up over many years. That library will not transition over to PC so those users are effectively starting from scratch." Of course, that's not to say that the PS5 Pro is a 'good deal'. "That user base likely has a physical game library, too - so the notion you don't even get a disc drive for your £699/$699 is nuts," Leadbetter concludes. There may be other people looking at the PS5 Pro and failing to see a good value proposition, too, although for entirely other reasons. "I think Phil Spencer watched the presentation and felt vindicated in the decision not to make a 'pro' console for this generation," Leadbetter theories. "Xbox players already have a great way to play high-end Xbox games - and that's on PC, where the enthusiast has more freedom to pick and choose the kind of hardware they want." It's true: Microsoft has been running three different platforms from the very start of the generation, offering a solution for players of all tastes and budgets. It is arguably Xbox's biggest advantage over PlayStation. Who needs a Series X-X when you can play Starfield at 4K60 on a PC? Avowed's 30fps lock simply isn't a problem if you've already shelled out for an RTX 40-series graphics card. But, as we've already said, the PS5 Pro is not a PC. It's a different beast entirely. Is it the console the PlayStation hardcore needs, though? Let's see how fast it flies off the shelves this November.

How PS5 Pro's Price Compares With Other Launch Consoles

After months of rumors we finally got our first look at the PlayStation 5 Pro. Shortly after, we had to pick up our eyeballs after they all popped out of our skulls when we found out that the Pro model will retail for a whopping $699.99 USD. At $699.99, the PlayStation 5 Pro will be one of the most expensive home consoles ever released (it's even more expensive in Europe and Japan, retailing for around $880 and $850 respectively). And while PlayStation is boasting big upgrades to the GPU, ray-tracing, and AI, the jury's out on whether those "three pillars," as lead architect Mark Cerny calls them, justify the price. It also got us thinking about how the PlayStation 5 Pro's price compares to what other consoles cost at launch and, after a little digging, the numbers we found were certainly surprising. Below we've listed the launch price for every main PlayStation hardware release, plus we've adjusted them for inflation to draw a better comparison with the PS5 Pro's $700 price tag. We've also thrown in a handful of other major consoles, just to really see how things compare. PS5 Pro Versus Other PlayStations The PS5 Pro is the most expensive PlayStation console ever released by Sony. And that's not even including the optional disc-drive and stand, which adds another $110 on top of the $700 retail price. Even compared to past Pro models, the PS5 Pro is an outlier. When the PlayStation 4 was released in 2013, it retailed for $399 USD. Three years later, the PS4 Pro was released and cost... $399 USD. And while today $500 consoles are becoming normalized, the PS5 Pro's $700 asking price is still head-spinning. In fact, only one PlayStation console has the PS5 Pro beat in terms of price. Can you guess which one? PlayStation 1 The very first PlayStation was released in 1995 and retailed for $299 USD. Adjusted for inflation, the PS1 would cost $613 USD in 2024. Pretty spicy considering the kind of consoles we can get for that much money nowadays, but the '90s were certainly a different time. PlayStation 2 The GOAT console itself, the PS2 was released in 2000 and cost $299 USD. Adjusted for inflation, the PS2 would cost $545 USD in 2024. Worth every penny. PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 was released in 2006 and, as immortalized by the memes, the 60GB model retailed for $599 USD. While Sony quickly cut the price of the console soon afterwards, the damage was already done. Adjusted for inflation, that same sticker price is now $934 USD in 2024, making it the one console more expensive than the PS5 Pro at launch. Even the "cheaper" 20GB model, which cost $499 back in 2006, would cost $778. No wonder it's the worst-selling mainline PlayStation console of all time. PlayStation 3 Slim The PS3 Slim, one of the best console redesigns in history in my opinion, also dramatically reduced the cost over the original PS3 when it was released in 2009 for $299 USD. Adjusted for inflation, that's around $436 USD in 2024. Much better, Sony, but maybe too little too late. PlayStation 4 Sony clearly learned from its mistake with the PS3, so when the PS4 was released in 2013 it was priced at a modest $399 USD. Adjusted for inflation, that comes to around $533 USD in 2024. PlayStation 4 Pro The first mid-cycle refresh from PlayStation, the PS4 Pro included additional horsepower and storage. Not quite the three pillars included with the PS5 Pro, but a nice upgrade for anyone who wanted to play Red Dead Redemption 2 without their console overheating. When it was released in 2016 it cost the same as the launch PS4 at $399 USD. Adjusted for inflation, that is $517 USD in 2024. PlayStation 5 & PlayStation 5 Digital The base PS5 and PS5 Digital split the PlayStation line for the first time, and into two different price brackets. Both released in 2020, the PS5 with the disc drive cost $499.99 USD at launch, or $596.83 when adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the all-digital PS5 cost $399.99, or $477.46 USD when adjusted for inflation. PlayStation 5 Slim In 2023, Sony released the relatively low-key PS5 Slim, which actually isn't all that much smaller than the base PS5. The main feature is the detachable disc drive, which you can either buy bundled with the system for $499.99 USD, or $516.75 when adjusted for inflation; or just the digital Slim for $449.99, or $465.07 USD when adjusted for inflation. PlayStation 5 Pro And as we all know, the PS5 Pro will retail at $699.99 USD when it goes on pre-order later this month. Wowza. The PS5 Pro Compared to Other Consoles But what about other game consoles at launch - how does the PS5 Pro compare to them? Well, I'm here to report that even with adjustments for inflation, the PS5 Pro handily beats out the competition, though a couple of systems do come close. Here's a handful of other consoles and how they compare to the PS5 Pro launch price. NES The original NES was released in 1985 and retailed for $179 USD in North America. With inflation that comes to $521 USD in 2024. Sega Genesis Sega was also releasing consoles around this time and in 1989 it released the Sega Genesis for $189 USD, or $481 USD after adjusting for inflation. SNES A few years later, in 1991, Nintendo released the SNES. At launch the SNES cost $199 USD, or $456 USD after adjusting for inflation. Sega Dreamcast The last of the Sega consoles, the Dreamcast was released in 1998 and retailed for $199 USD, or $372 USD in 2024 after adjusting for inflation. Nintendo 64 The N64 was released in 1996 and cost $199 USD at launch, or $372 USD after adjusting for inflation. Xbox The original Xbox was gunning right for the PS2 throne when it was released in 2001. At launch it cost $299 USD, or with inflation, $527 USD in 2024. As a reminder, the PS2 was released a year earlier also for $299 USD at launch. Nintendo GameCube Nintendo kept things simple for its N64 follow-up, releasing the GameCube in 2001 for $199 USD, or $351 USD after adjusting for inflation. Xbox 360 Xbox's most-successful console ever, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005 and launched with a retail price of $299 USD, or $482 USD after adjusting for inflation. Wii Nintendo chose a different tact for the Wii, focusing on a novel motion-control system rather than going toe-to-toe with Xbox and PlayStation on graphics. The Nintendo Wii was released in 2006 and cost $249 USD at launch, or $388 USD after adjusting for inflation. Wii U The forgotten Wii U was released a few year later in 2012 and cost $299 USD at launch, or $406 USD after adjusting for inflation. The less said about this, the better. Xbox One Xbox's own hardware mishap, the Xbox One, was billed as an all-in-one entertainment system rather than purely a game console. It was also priced at an astounding $499 USD when it was released in 2013, or $667 USD after adjusting for inflation. This is the closest a non-PlayStation console gets to the cost of the PS5 Pro. Xbox One X Xbox also introduced a sleeker, mid-cycle upgrade with the Xbox One X. This model was also priced at $499 USD when it was released in 2017, or $634 USD after adjusting for inflation. Xbox Series X & S Whereas Sony's dual PS5 offerings have the same specs and power, and only differ when it comes to a physical media player, the differences between Microsoft's dual-console offerings were more dramatic. The Xbox Series X and S don't just differ on price, but the Series X boasts a far more impressive spec-sheet than the Series S. As such, the Series X retailed for $499.00 USD at launch, or $596.83 USD after inflation, while the Series S retailed for $299.99 USD, or $358.09 USD after inflation. Both systems were released in 2020. Nintendo Switch Seven years old and still going strong, the Nintendo Switch is one of the best-selling consoles of all time. The hybrid system was released in 2017 and retailed for $299.99 USD, or $381.15 USD after adjusting for inflation. All eyes are on the upcoming Switch successor, and who knows how Nintendo will price that next system. And there you have it. The PS5 Pro's price is certainly shocking, though history shows there have certainly been other expensive consoles at launch. While the PS5 Pro boasts some impressive upgrades, it remains to be seen whether they're enough to get customers on board at the suggested retail price.

GRTV News - Here is our first look at the PlayStation 5 Pro

"Hello everyone and welcome back to another GRTV News. You can probably already guess what we're going to be talking about today. It was the big announcement yesterday, the PS5 Pro. Kind of, in many ways, a bit of an underwhelming announcement. Not that I was expecting a huge deal from it in the first place. Now, I'll get into all of that in a moment. For the time being, let's just dive on in and take a look at this console. So yes, PlayStation 5 Pro to launch this November for an absolute fortune. So the PS5 Pro unveiling broadcast hosted by the legendary Mark Churney just concluded and revealed that Sony's more powerful iteration of its current gaming console will be launching as soon as this November." "Many suspected that we'd be getting the system before the end of the year, but the big question was surrounding how expensive it would be at debut. It turns out the answer to that question is very expensive. The PS5 Pro will set you back a whopping £699, $699 or €799 when it arrives on November 7th. Why would you want to put that much cash forward for a games console? Because as Churney puts it, it includes the big three, three hardware pillars that enable better performance, better ray tracing and advanced AI capabilities, which combine to make the most powerful console we've ever built and a worthy addition to the PS5 family and a device that is regarded as close to doubling the power of PlayStation 5. I'm not going to bring it up here, but if you do want to read more about the big three over, you can by clicking on that link in the news piece. The wonderful Alberto wrote a much more complex technological piece in regards to those things. Now, essentially, if you have no problem with playing low fidelity games at 60fps or high fidelity games at 30fps, the console won't be the one for you. If you're desperate to play all games at 60fps with ray tracing enabled and more detailed graphics, then the PS5 Pro won't be one to miss when it debuts in a couple of months' time. And there's the reveal trailer. I'm not going to play it, but if you want to watch it, it's there. And otherwise, that's the actual console itself. Basically, just a PS5 with some lines going through the side bit there. And also, no disk drive. There's also this stand here, which is a new stand. It's one that doesn't come included with the console. Meaning, if you want to buy a disk drive, and if you want to buy the stand, you have to put that all on top of the cost of the console itself, which I think adds about another $150, believe it or not. And as well, it is worth saying, because of these lines here, if you did have any of the plates to customise your original PS5, they seemingly will no longer fit. You'll have to get special ones for the PS5 Pro. So, yes. But as I said, or alluded to at the start, I never expected this console to be like a huge innovation and a huge step forward, because I still don't think we've really seen a lot of games actually utilise what these consoles can do at their extent. And I think it's mainly because there's such a huge player base still using PS4 and Xbox One, that developers, we haven't really seen many developers up until very recently leaving behind those last generation consoles. So, all of a sudden we've got this PS5 Pro, and yes, don't get me wrong, it will be nice to play these games using the Fidelity graphics first mode at a smooth and fluid 60fps, and potentially, what we're assuming, to be able to play more games at 120fps. That's all really nice. But is that something that's really worth hashing out £700 and putting it forward to a console that really is a minor improvement to a console that really hasn't been utilised to its full extent anyway in the first place? That's the big question mark. I personally don't think this console is necessary still. I think that it's a huge investment for something that seems minor. But you never know, by the end of the generation, those who didn't upgrade to a PS5 Pro might be really feeling it, you never know. Maybe by the time that GTA 6 eventually debuts and you have a sort of an 18-month period or whatever before the next generation of consoles come out, maybe you'd be wishing that you had that PS5 Pro to be able to handle a game of what we're expecting to be significantly more demanding than some of the things we've seen as of late." "Regardless, I think it's expensive. If you go back and you adjust the prices or the launch prices of a lot of other PlayStation consoles, the PS5 Pro isn't actually that steep compared to some of them. But what I will say is that it's one of the most expensive PlayStation consoles to date. The real outlier was the PS3, but I think the reason it was an outlier was because it was the first one to include a Blu-ray player baked into it, and at the time that was a very expensive piece of technology. So yeah, the PS3 was really expensive, but then the PS4 was really quite, not cheap, but it was quite cost-friendly, consumer-friendly in the way that it was priced. And the PS4 Pro was the same as well. The PS5 was a bit more expensive again, and this one here feels like a ridiculous amount of money for a console that doesn't really feel like it needs an upgrade in the first place. But yeah, let's know what you think about it. Again, go read all about that technology stuff. I'm not going to talk about it here. I don't think it's that exciting, to be honest. The big three is basically more power, better computing power, advanced ray tracing capabilities, or better ways to incorporate ray tracing into the actual hardware itself, and then AI. Mark Cerny kept throwing around this whole idea of PSSR, which is just an AI system really that, you know, everything's AI these days. The new iPhones got revealed earlier this week. AI is the main thing for them. The big thing at the EFA 2024 has been AI and how they're combating AI and all this stuff. And for PS5 Pro, it's also AI. So go and check out all that stuff. Let us know what you think about it. Will you be picking up a PS5? Are you going out of your way to buy a PlayStation 5 Pro when it debuts on November 7th? Tell us all about it in the comments below, and otherwise I'll be back now tomorrow for the next GRTV News of the Week. Take care, everyone."

Internet Reacts to PS5 Pro's $700 Price Point With Shock as Analyst Says It's a 40-50% Premium on Slim PS5 - IGN

Fans compare new premium console to the infamous debut of the PlayStation 3. The PlayStation 5 Pro was officially revealed during a presentation hosted by Mark Cerny this morning. While it features a bevy of improvements, including support for AI upscaling and playing in quality mode with much higher frame-rates, fans were quick to notice its price point -- a cool $700. Following Cerny's presentation, most of the comments focused on the PS5 Pro's premium pricing. Many noticed immediately that it not only lacks a disc drive, but that even the vertical stand is sold separately. With the vertical stand and the disc drive, the PS5 Pro is more than $800. "$700 for no disk drive is crazy. I'm not paying almost $800 to play a console with a disk drive. $700 for physical may have been acceptable, but digital only for that price is absurd," read one of the top comments on Reddit. Fans also weighed in on X/Twitter, with some recalling when Sony shocked the world by pricing the PlayStation 3 at $600 back in the mid-2000s. In a poll on the IGN X/Twitter asking fans if they planned to purchase a PS5 Pro, more than 80 percent of fans answered in the negative. Analyzing the price following the announcement, analyst Piers Harding-Rolls posted a chart comparing the PS4 and PS5 generations in which he called the slim PS5 a "40-50 percent premium on the slim PS5." You can see the chart above. Over on Bluesky, analyst Mat Piscatella wondered what this means for the PS6. "Starting to have more doubt around PS6 launching with a model including a physical media drive. But that's a topic for later I reckon." In the meantime, the PS5 Pro's price led at least a few fans to take stock of the PS5's generation so far, with one pointing out how common it still is for games to release on PS4 and PS4 Pro. "It's pretty sad for the state of this generation when like 90% of the games they showed are playable on last gen as well," one fan wrote Sony has been quietly raising prices on the PS5 in many markets for a while now, with the Dualsense price also jumping from $69.99 to $74.99. In an interview with IGN that we ran last week, analyst Daniel Ahmad offered some insight into why consoles have failed to drop in price over the course of the generation. "One, production and shipping costs are not declining in-line with previous generations, especially for components such as SSDs. This was especially notable during the early COVID-19 period which severely impacted supply chains and led to shortages for chips, paired with an increase in demand for at-home entertainment, which led to increasing costs," he explained. "Two, console platform holders are struggling to maintain gross profit margins across the board. This has led to price maintenance (or even price increases in some markets) to ensure hardware remains profitable. Three, the Xbox Series S and PS5 Digital Edition were already sold at a significant loss on day 1. The increased focus on profitability for disc models is to try and offset losses, maintain margins, and weather external factors that may impact spending on games such as cost of living increases." Sony will hope that the PS5 Pro's technical improvements will be enough to push relucant fans over the line. Following the presentation, Cerny touted its various performance increases, with Sony claiming that it will push 67 percent more Compute Units than the current PS5 and 28 percent faster memory. Overall, they claim, it's a 45 percent increase in rendering speed for gameplay. With the gap in visuals shrinking in recent years, though, at least some fans said they struggled to see the difference in the graphics. "It's mad that this late in the cycle they are dropping this with a ~£250 increase in the price of the regular PS5. I can understand why they would go for it, but it is a risky move," a fan wrote on Resetera. "The real baffling decision is to drop the disc drive. I haven't seen the stats but i would assume the majority of PS5 owners opted for the disc version, so removing that and forcing them to buy an additional peripheral to play the games they own, feels astonishing. But maybe there are stats that show most picked up the digital console edition and it's a logical move to make the disc optional." We'll know how fans feel about the PS5 Pro when it releases on November 7. Pre-orders go live on September 26. There's plenty more to dig into now that the PS5 Pro is officially live, so make sure to keep an eye on IGN for our full analysis.