Sony unveils PS5 Pro, price during PlayStation Technical Presentation

Sony’s Mark Cerny showed off the PS5 Pro, but you might be hard pressed to see the difference

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Sony’s Mark Cerny showed off the PS5 Pro during a PlayStation Technical Presentation, but you might be hard-pressed to see the difference. You might be pressed even harder to cough up the necessary cash for the purchase.

Sony set the PS5 Pro price at $699.99 and continues the trend of eschewing regional price equivalence with £699 for the UK and €799 elsewhere, and the PS5 Pro release date is November 7, 2024.

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PS5 designer Mark Cerny gave a brief breakdown of what the PS5 Pro does differently, and it’s in line with the PS5 Pro specs list that leaked earlier in the year. The PS5 Pro features a larger, faster GPU that can render up to 45 percent more quickly. The system also calculates light rays more quickly – up to double or triple the rate the base PS5 calculates them – and Sony packed in new tech called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, which adds new pixels and lets you boost the resolution without altering the framerate.

As we and others said previously, the PS5 Pro is less about improving visuals and more about making sure you can have visual fidelity without losing out on performance. How effectively the PS5 Pro achieves this is still up in the air, though. Cerny briefly showed several examples of games running on the console and said they all use the new tech differently. Some, such as Hogwarts Legacy, will feature better lighting and reflections, while a few, including Horizon Forbidden West, boast some visual enhancements.

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Cerny also said games will “target” 60fps, so it sounds like there may be some variation in whether games can hit or maintain that framerate.

Bear in mind that the initial $699 cost only gets you a PS5 Pro without a disc drive. If you want to play the physical games you own, you’ll need to shell out even more money for an additional disc drive.