All the news about Sony’s PS5 Pro

You don’t need me to tell you the new PS5 Pro, on sale November 7th, is the most powerful PlayStation ever made. The real question: could it possibly be worth $700, the most Sony’s ever charged for a game console?

I think I can answer that — but first, I need you to go find a measuring tape.

Ahead of the PS5 Pro launch later this week, we have confirmation of a few more official specifications for the most powerful version of the PS5 yet. Digital Foundry has shared details from the manual included with its PS5 Pro review unit, confirming the console is powered by an AMD Ryzen Zen 2 8-core/16-thread processor with an RDNA-based graphics engine producing 16.7TF of GPU compute performance compared to the base PS5’s 10.23TF.

As we noted in March, initial leaked documents showed a much higher figure for the PS5 Pro, mostly due to a change in AMD’s RDNA architecture.

We’re inching ever closer to a mid-cycle refresh for the PlayStation 5, as preorders for Sony’s forthcoming console are now available to the masses. Although the $699.99 machine was originally exclusive to the PlayStation Direct storefront, it’s now up for preorder at all major retailers — including Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, and Target.

Sony’s retro-styled 30th Anniversary consoles and accessories also went up for preorder at the same time as the standard PS5 Pro, but unfortunately, they quickly sold out and are still unavailable.

Sony finally confirmed the PS5 Pro, and in addition to enhanced features like Wi-Fi 7 and 8K gaming, the company has been sharing how recent and older games will perform on the system. As of September 25th, it’s revealed 25 different PS5 games that developers are specifically enhancing for the new console — here’s our hands-on with 11 of them.

The PS5 Pro may also “stabilize or improve the performance of supported PS4 and PS5 games” with a feature called Game Boost, and the Pro’s “enhanced image quality” could possibly improve the resolution for certain PS4 games.

Eight years ago, PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny showed me the power of the PS4 Pro in this very room. Today, I’m checking out the new PS5 Pro instead — and feeling some major déjà vu.

Like before, Sony is showing journalists a room full of screens at its PlayStation US headquarters just outside of San Francisco, playing 11 games side by side on both the original hardware and the guts of the new $700 Pro. Like before, you’ll pay a hefty premium for graphical improvements rather than new titles. Like before, games will need to be patched to give you most of those boosts, and not all patches will be equal.

Sony has just revealed seven additional games that’ll get enhanced by its PS5 Pro, coming November 7th, on top of the games it previously revealed. New titles include Stellar Blade, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, F1 24, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, both Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Additionally, developers confirmed a number of extra games in an official PlayStation blog post, including the new Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, The Last of Us Part I, Spider-Man Remastered and Spider-Man Miles Morales, and Rise of the Ronin. Insomniac suggests Marvel’s Wolverine will get enhanced for the Pro cosnole too.

We’ve now gotten our own brief look at the $700 PS5 Pro, coming this November. Fair warning: it’s a very limited look indeed. Just photos, no touching yet!

Given how little Sony has yet shared about its big, pricy console refresh, and the excitement for the company’s just-announced limited-edition PlayStation 30th Anniversary Collection, I figure you may want a peek anyhow.

Sony has deftly come up with a way to get more people on board with the PS5 Pro. The company has announced a special 30th anniversary collection for the suite of PS5 consoles and accessories that is unfortunately sick as hell.

“To celebrate this 30th anniversary milestone, we had to create something that honored the history and joy that PlayStation has brought us all,” said PlayStation platform business CEO Hideaki Nishino. All the consoles and accessories are cast in classic PlayStation gray and feature the old-school multicolored PlayStation logo creating a look designed to target every gaming 30-something’s nostalgia organ with surgical precision.

I think Sony might have made a mistake.

Not by pricing the PS5 Pro at $700 or ditching the optical drive — it can always drop the price or bundle — but by trying to showcase the PS5 Pro’s graphical improvements using a bandwidth-limited, compressed YouTube video.

After various rumors and leaks, the PlayStation 5 Pro is finally official — complete with a new GPU, $700 price point, and no built-in disc drive. But is that pretty much it? What makes this new console 40 percent more expensive than the existing PS5 you can buy today for $500? The same one that’s bound to go on sale during the holidays, not long after the Pro’s November 7th launch date.

What are the differences between the PS5 and PS5 Pro that make it (depending who you ask) a worthwhile upgrade or a superfluous expense?

Want a PS5, but don’t want to spend $700 on a PS5 Pro? Thanks to Sony’s new refurbished website for PS5s, you’ll soon be able to buy an older version of the console for a lot less money than the PS5 Pro’s eye-watering cost.

You can see everything that’s on offer on Sony’s certified refurbished website, which lists a bunch of products as “coming soon.” A refurbished PS5 in the original launch design with a disc drive will cost $399.99 (a $100 discount from a new PS5 slim with a disc drive), while a refurbished all-digital PS5, also in the original design, will cost $349.99 (also a $100 discount).

Today may have marked the beginning of the end for game console disc drives. Sony finally announced the $699.99 PS5 Pro, and while it looks to be an impressive machine, it’s the first PlayStation console that will require you to buy the console and a separate disc drive if you want to play your physical games.

Sony’s offered disc-free variants before and inched in this direction with the PS5 “slim,” which you can buy with the separate disc drive already attached or add a disc drive to later. But with the PS5 Pro, you’ll have to get a separate PS5 disc drive, whether that means you buy it for $79.99 or swap a disc drive from a slim PS5 to a PS5 Pro. 

Sony just announced the $699.99 PS5 Pro, a beefed-up version of the PS5 that includes a larger GPU and advanced ray tracing support. But if you want to play your physical games on the new console, you’ll have to pay extra: a disc drive isn’t included, so you’ll have to buy and install one separately for an additional $79.99.

“PS5 Pro is available as a disc-less console, with the option to purchase the currently available Disc Drive for PS5 separately,” Sony’s Hideaki Nishino writes in a PlayStation Blog post. That means if you are buying both the console and the disc drive together, you’ll be paying a whopping $779.98.