The PS5 Pro is tipped to be a mid-cycle upgrade on the massively popular PS5. PlayStation is yet to confirm its existence, but various supports indicate it could be in production.
We’ve been keeping a close eye on all the news and rumours surrounding the PS5 Pro console so you know what to expect. We’re also adding some of our own speculation on what the next Sony console may look like.
Release date
According to the YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead, the PS5 Pro could arrive sometime in 2023. The channel’s founder said, “There is a PlayStation 5 Pro coming in a similar timeframe to when one came out after the original PS4 launch.”
Since the PS4 Pro launched in 2016, three years after the release of the PS4 console, Sony could be aiming for a similar time frame when it comes to the latest Pro console.
A leaked TCL presentation (via ppe.pl) also indicates that a PS5 Pro will launch in 2023 or 2024, although it’s hard to know whether this is just speculation or insider knowledge.
There’s yet to be any reliable or credible information detailing the release date of the PS5, so take all of those rumours with a pinch of salt, but rumours are indicating that a launch could happen either this year or next.
Price
The price of the PS5 Pro is not clear, although Moore’s Law is Dead suggested that it could be priced as high as $700, depending on how hard they push the new hardware.
However, it’s possible that the PS5 Pro may have a more reasonable price of £450/$490, adopting the same price point as the vanilla PS5. Since the PS4 Pro launched with the same £349.99/$399.99 price point as the base PS4, it would make sense for Sony to stick to the same tactics.
However, until we know more about the pricing for the PS5 Pro, we recommend that you take these rumours with a healthy dose of scepticism, as Sony may have a completely different plan in mind.
Design
When the PS5 originally launched back in 2020, one of the major talking points around the console was its striking design. Unlike the PS4, it can be configured to lay on its side or stand up, with a new black and white colour combination.
There have been few rumours about the design of the PS5 Pro, but if the PS4 Pro is anything to go by, we can assume that it will be larger than the original PS5 to fit in any upgraded internals and features.
We hope that the PS5 Pro keeps the same vertical and horizontal configuration as its predecessor, as it makes it a lot easier to adapt it to your gaming space. Until we get more information on the design we can only speculate, but it would be great to see a sleeker version of the PS5, even if that means getting rid of the disk drive.
Specs
The specs of the PS5 Pro are a little hard to predict, but we can expect that it will be more powerful than its predecessor. The PS5 can run supported games in 4K with a 120Hz refresh rate with features like ray tracing also present.
The next logical upgrade could well be improved performance to hit 8K resolution for AAA games. But since 8K monitors and TVs are already pretty inaccessible to most users, it’s unlikely that this will be a major focus. The compromise could be that the PS5 Pro maintains a 4K performance, but with more headroom to allow for a higher refresh rate with ray tracing activated.
A job listing for AMD posted in May 2022 suggested that the company is currently working on an RDNA chipset for consoles. While there is no definitive evidence that this will be used with the PS5 Pro, it could back up the idea that the latest Sony console would get a sizable chip upgrade that could provide more power.
We also caught wind of a patent filed by Sony’s Mark Cerny which mentions that the latest console may upgrade its ray tracing performance. This patent looks to be adapting the current hardware within the PS5, but since the vanilla console is unlikely to see any hardware changes three years after its release, it could end up playing a role in the PS5 Pro.
It’s possible that Sony could take advantage of AMD’s latest Radeon RX 7000 GPU architecture, as well as the newest Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs. But this is just idle speculation at the moment, with no big hints from either company that they will be teaming up with Sony.
We would also like to see a storage upgrade for the PS5 Pro since the base model comes with a measly 825GB SSD. It would be great to see a 2TB model, with 1TB quickly becoming too little to hold a large library of modern games. The Spider-Man Miles Morales Ultimate Edition takes up a whopping 170.5GB alone.
If you want to know even more about the PS5 Pro then make sure you bookmark this page and come back soon, as we will be sure to update this article once we learn more about the latest console.
The Trusted Take
I want to be excited about the PS5 Pro, but I don’t see it offering any invaluable upgrades over the PS5. Since 8K TVs and monitors are still very cost-prohibitive, I don’t see the latest console attempting to hit these heights. Not only would it be inaccessible for most users, but it would also require a massive amount of power – even Nvidia isn’t really marketing its ultra-powerful RTX 4090 graphics card at 8K gaming.
However, I believe the PS5 Pro will be more powerful, likely giving users the ability to play games in 4K with higher refresh rates. With the PS5 struggling to run games at a high performance with ray tracing activated, this could be one area where a PS5 Pro could really shine – pardon the pun.
