Sony announces the PlayStation 5 Pro with upgraded GPU and AI image upscaling

Sony has announced its most powerful game console yet, the PlayStation 5 Pro, which is an updated model of the PlayStation 5 that was announced back in 2020.

Like the PS4 Pro before it, the PS5 Pro is aimed entirely at improving the graphical fidelity of its games, with three key new improvements towards that goal.

The first of this is an upgraded GPU. While it's still based on the same architecture, the PS5 Pro GPU now features 67% more compute units and 28% faster memory. Sony claims that these changes provide 45% faster rendering of games compared to the PS5.

The other improvement is to hardware accelerated ray tracing. Considering AMD graphics rely on their compute units for ray tracing, the increase in the number of compute units also increases the ray tracing performance. Sony claims the PS5 Pro GPU can cast rays at double or even triple the rate of the PS5 GPU.

Finally, Sony also announced a new AI-driven image upscaling solution that it developed in-house. Called the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, it uses AI and machine learning to upsample images to a higher resolution. Considering this is likely a hardware accelerated solution, it should provide better results than the mediocre software-based AMD FSR technology that PS5 games used and should be on par with DLSS from Nvidia or XeSS from Intel. Sony didn't mention any frame generation aspect, however, so this seems to be purely an image upscaling solution.

Speaking about the new hardware, PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny mentioned the need for a performance and quality toggle within games on the PS5, which lets the user pick between high frame rates or image quality. This resulted in users picking the performance mode 3/4 times for better frame rates, which compromised on image quality.

The goal of the PS5 Pro, it seems, was to make this toggle redundant and provide image quality that you expect from the quality mode at 60FPS, thereby giving the best of both worlds.

With the combination of more powerful hardware and native image upscaling, this seems quite doable, but we will have to wait for native support to arrive within games to see if the claim holds up. Sony did showcase a handful of first and third party titles taking advantage of the improved performance of the new console. Games optimized for the new console will feature a PS5 Pro Enhanced label within.

Sony also announced a new PS5 Pro Game Boost feature, which can apply to more than 8500 PS4 titles and boost their resolution and frame rate for the new console. The new console also features Wi-Fi 7 in regions where it is supported, as well as support for VRR and 8K displays.

The PS5 Pro features only slight visual changes from the standard PS5. It's taller than the current slim model but has the same thickness as the PS5 model without Blu-ray disc. The PS5 Pro doesn't have an optional optical disc model, and users will have to purchase it separately (it's the same drive available for the PS5). The only consolation here is that the PS5 Pro includes 2TB internal storage compared to 1TB on the standard model.

The PS5 Pro is priced at $700, which is 56% more than the $450 price of the digital PS5. The console will go on sale later this year on November 7, with pre-orders starting on September 26.

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