After months of rumours and speculation, Sony has finally revealed the PlayStation 5 Pro console, an update to its current machine, offering enhanced technical specifications and a 2TB solid state drive for £699/$699. It is launching on 7 November, with pre-orders beginning on 26 September.
It is an expensive machine compared with current systems, coming in at £300 more than the Digital Edition PlayStation 5, which retails at £390. It’s also digital only: if you want to play games or movies on Blu-ray discs, you’ll have to add a Blu-ray player for an extra £100.
For the price, what you’re getting is an upgraded graphics processing unit (GPU) featuring 67% more compute units than the original model (compute units are the individual processors within a GPU, which work in parallel to execute multiple threads of data simultaneously). With a 28% boost in system memory, Sony is claiming this will lead to a 45% increase in graphics rendering in games that support the updated machine. The Pro console will also support more advanced ray tracing, a visual effect that brings dynamic reflections to surfaces such as glass and water. Enhanced games will also be able to offer an 8K mode.
Sony says that games patched to support the upgraded hardware will be identified with a “PS5 Pro Enhanced” label. These will include many of the company’s first party PS5 titles such as Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Third-party publishers have also committed to support the machine with titles including Alan Wake 2, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth lined up to provide Pro enhancements.
To support the rest of the back catalogue, PS5 Pro promises “AI-driven” upscaling of games to improve their performance on the new hardware. Sony also revealed what it calls the PS5 Pro Game Boost, which will improve the visual performance of “more than 8,500” backward compatible PS4 games.
It has long been a business model for console manufacturers to update their machines after several years on the market. In the past, this usually meant more compact designs, such as the PS2 Slim, but the previous generation of Sony and Microsoft machines saw significant technical updates with both the PlayStation 4 Pro and the Xbox One X.
Industry opinion is divided on how Sony’s latest update will fare, especially in a challenging economy and with no major new game release or fresh audio-visual technology to support. As analyst Rob Fahey recently wrote: “PS4 Pro justified its existence in a very straightforward way: many consumers had upgraded to 4K displays in the preceding years, and the Pro delivered a version of the PS4 that could support those displays.” On X, the memes have been merciless.
However, veteran industry watcher Piers Harding-Rolls at Ampere Analysis told VGC he expects sales of around 1.3m PS5 Pros during the launch window and around 13m units by 2029. One major factor that could boost sales is the announced arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6 in autumn 2025, which will almost certainly be the biggest-selling game of its generation. Before Sony’s announcement, most pundits expected the PS5 Pro to be launched to coincide with GTA 6 thereby capitalising on excitement and ensuring its status as the most powerful console to play the new game on. It could be, however, that Sony is giving itself time to announce a price cut or bundle closer to the launch of Rockstar’s game.
For now, the PS5 Pro is the culmination of a complicated month for Sony, which has seen Concord, its online shooter, withdraw from sale after just two weeks, but also the huge critical success of first-party platformer, Astro Bot – a game that doesn’t rely on hi-tech visual realism. The eyes of the industry will now be on Microsoft for its response. There are persistent rumours that the Redmond company is veering in a different direction, planning a portable version of the Xbox to compete in the burgeoning handheld PC gaming market against the likes of the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally X. With prices for these machines reaching up to £800 this could be an expensive time for console consumers.
• This article was amended on 11 September 2024 to correct the price difference between a standard PS5 and the PS5 Pro. The amount was originally stated in the article as £200, whereas the cheapest PS5 package is £390, making the difference more than £300.
