PS5 Pro is now official and priced at €799

The PlayStation 5 Pro, an upgraded version of the 2020-announced PlayStation 5, is the most powerful game console that Sony has ever released. The PS5 Pro, like the PS4 Pro before it, has three major new enhancements geared toward increasing the graphical fidelity of its games.

The improved GPU is the first of these. The PS5 Pro GPU has 28% quicker memory and 67% more processing units despite having the same architecture. According to Sony, these modifications enable games to render 45% faster than on the PS5.

An additional enhancement pertains to hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Increasing the number of compute units significantly improves ray tracing performance because AMD graphics rely on these units for ray tracing. According to Sony, the PS5 Pro GPU can project rays twice or perhaps three times faster than the PS5 GPU.

Finally, Sony introduced a new AI-driven image upscaling solution that it created in-house. The PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to upsample photos to higher resolutions. Given that this is most likely a hardware-accelerated solution, it should outperform the inferior software-based AMD FSR technology used in PS5 games and be comparable to Nvidia's DLSS and Intel's XeSS. Sony did not mention any frame creation features, so this appears to be strictly an image upscaling technique.

Mark Cerny, the head architect at PlayStation, spoke about the new hardware and said that games on the PS5 should have a performance and quality toggle that allows the user to choose between high frame rates and high image quality. Users chose the performance setting three times as a result, sacrificing visual quality in the process to get higher frame rates.

The PS5 Pro appears to have been designed to make this toggle obsolete while still providing the image quality that you would expect from the quality mode at 60FPS, giving you the best of both.

This appears to be achievable with a combination of more powerful hardware and native picture upscaling, but we'll have to wait for native support to arrive in games to see whether the claim is true. Sony did show off a handful of first and third-party titles that take use of the new console's increased performance. Games that have been optimized for the new console will be labeled PS5 Pro Enhanced.

Sony also revealed a new PS5 Pro Game Boost function, which can be applied to over 8500 PS4 titles to increase their resolution and frame rate for the next console. In addition, the new console supports VRR and 8K screens, as well as Wi-Fi 7 in certain countries.

The PS5 Pro has just minor appearance differences from the ordinary PS5. It stands taller than the current slim variant but has the same thickness as the PS5 model without a Blu-ray disc. The PS5 Pro does not include an optional optical disc model, thus consumers must purchase it individually. The PS5 Pro has 2TB of internal storage, compared to the normal model's 1TB.

The PS5 Pro is priced at €799.99, which is significantly higher than the €549.99 pricing of the original PS5. The console will be on sale later this year, on November 7, with pre-orders beginning on September 26.