The PS5 Pro is finally announced for a dizzying $700

Sony kicked off the PS5 Technical Presentation with Mark Cerny by jumping right into the announcement of the PS5 Pro. Cerny then took some time to talk about how cool the PS5 is.

He then talks about how developers want higher framerates than 60fps. Or especially higher than 30fps. Apparently, players choose Performance over Fidelity three-quarters of the time. I tend to swap between the two, depending on the game. The framerate thing seems to be the focus of the presentation.

When going over the hardware, Cerny says that it will have a 67% “larger” GPU with 28% faster RAM that apparently renders at 45% faster. It improves Ray Tracing speeds. It is also implementing AI Upscaling (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, as they call it). They showed a few games running on both systems and how it improves the framerate without cutting down on the appearance of the game.

Color me unimpressed. I can see the difference, sure, but it doesn’t seem all that dramatic. The presentation really pushed the framerate thing. I like higher framerates, but this feels like worse value than I’d get by upgrading my GPU, which, to be fair, could cost about as much as the PS5 Pro. The upgraded visuals seem pretty miniscule for the price they’re asking. There’s also no disc drive, so you’d be paying extra for that. For the deep-pocketed enthusiast, I suppose.

If you’re into it, it’s going to set you back $699. For me, I could barely afford the base model. I’ll probably skip on the upgrade. Unless you want to gift it to me.