PS5, PS5 Pro: what are the differences between Sony’s consoles?
After months of rumors, Sony recently made official the PlayStation 5 Pro, the muscular version of its PS5. Expected on November 7th in stores at the (not at all) sweet price of €799, what does this version offer compared to the classic model (sold recently from 450€ reconditioned) ? No question here of analyzing the interest or not of the product, let's focus on the facts.
A design that changes little, but a major choice that divides
Sony has decided to carry over the PlayStation 5's black and white design, which simply gains three stripes on its sides. In terms of size, early observers say that the console even manages to stay between the original PS5 and the PS5 Slim. The PS5 Pro also swaps a USB-A port on the back for a USB-C one.
The major decision that has caused the most ink to flow is the absence of a Blu-ray disc player for this price. This can be purchased as an option at €130. This brings the bill up to €930, or €380 more than for a PS5 Slim with a player (the PS5 Slim without a player is offered at €450). As with the PS5 Slim, the vertical stand is also sold separately at €30.
Changes in the guts
In an attempt to justify this expensive digital console, Sony has upgraded almost all of its console's components. WiFi has been upgraded from version 6 to 7, storage has been upgraded from 825GB to 2TB, and most importantly, gaming performance should be improved.
To achieve this, Sony has chosen a GPU that is 67% more powerful than that of the classic PS5, and a RAM that is 28% faster. This should result in 45% better raw graphics performance, while the ray tracing is also announced to be 2 to 3 times more efficient. On the CPU side, we are still on a 3.50 GHz processor which should however be able to climb to 3.85 GHz thanks to a High CPU Frequency mode.
The PS5 Pro also exclusively embraces PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) technology. This is a solution forupscaling (like Nvidia's DLSS or AMD's FSR) to gain performance without sacrificing visual quality thanks to AI. In short, by combining all of this, loading times should be faster, frames per second more numerous and details more abundant and realistic than on the classic PS5.
It remains to be seen which games will benefit from all these improvements and to what extent. As with the PS4 Pro, fortunately no games should be exclusive to the PS5 Pro.
