The PS5 Pro is official: a new, more powerful console, very expensive and without an optical drive

The Internet has been buzzing for a few days with rumors suggesting the imminent existence of a PS5 Pro. Various leaks, Sherlock Holmes-esque deductions, sibylline interpretations of watermarks…: all these speculations were confirmed by a message from the official PlayStation account on September 9, 2024.

The mystery had therefore been largely revealed, but who better than Mark Cerny, father of the hardware architecture of the PS4 and PS5, to reveal the new features and technological advances of the PS5 Pro? The specifications mentioned by the engineer, articulated around the big three (bigger GPU, technology of ray tracing improved and a upscaling using AI), are rigorously similar to those that leaked, even in the performance gains that we are repeating here.

CPU

• Same as the PS5, but with a High CPU Frequency Mode feature that boosts the CPU frequency up to 3.85GHz instead of 3.50GHz
• 576GB/s (18GT/s) system memory, a 28% increase over the current PlayStation 5 (448GB/s)

*GPU

• Rendering 45% faster than the “normal” PS5
• Raytracing 2 to 3 times more present
• 33.5 teraflops of computing power
• PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling, the equivalent of Nvidia's DLSS) support
• 8K resolution support
• Custom Machine Learning Architecture
• AI accelerator supporting up to 300 TOPS of 8-bit computing/67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point

While this was the case for the PS5 and PS5 Slim, the PS5 Pro will only be entitled to a digital version without the disc player. So we forget about the standard version with this accessory… for now!

A power boost not necessarily essential

As we can see, the performance gain is definitely there. It remains to be seen whether buyers will follow. Because even if sources indicate that developers have been encouraged to use the new graphics functions offered for “bring significant improvements”which would allow them to put a PS5 Enhanced sticker on the covers, not everyone will be ready to pay up to €350 more, depending on the model they already own, to replace a classic PS5 or ultimately equip themselves.

In addition, let's remember that the PS4 also had its Pro version with relative success. Indeed, according to the site tech4gamers.comof the 105 million consoles sold, only 14.3 million were Pro models.

The fact remains that the PS5 Pro will be available from November 7th and you will have to part with a “small” €799 note to no longer have to choose between a performance mode (to enjoy a smooth game) or a fidelity mode (to feast your eyes), as Mark Cerny pointed out in the presentation that you will find below.