Sony's PS5 Pro has a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI ...

The PS5 Pro is official. After months of leaks, Sony just announced a more powerful PS5 console during a special technical presentation. Mark Cerny, the lead architect of the PS5 console, says the PS5 Pro improves on the original console in three key ways: a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and custom AI-driven upscaling.

The PS5 Pro will launch on November 7th, priced at $699.99, and it looks similar to the slim version of the PS5 — just like recent leaks suggested it would. It has three stripes down the side, and it doesn’t come with a disc drive. You’ll be able to purchase a 4K Blu-ray disc drive separately and optional console covers.

“It’s the most powerful console we’ve ever built,” says Cerny. The hardware upgrades inside will result in 45 percent faster rendering, according to Cerny, and should improve the detail of certain games and frame rates. One of the key reasons for the PS5 Pro is to allow PS5 Pro players to not have to choose performance modes over fidelity ones. “Players are choosing performance about three-quarters of the time,” says Cerny.

Sony has upgraded the GPU inside the PS5 Pro with 67 percent more compute units than the current PS5 console, and it has 28 percent faster memory, too. That all adds up to the 45 percent faster rendering of games and the ability to improve frame rates in titles without having to lose visual fidelity.

This extra power should also improve ray-traced games, with Sony suggesting that developers will be able to allow “the rays to be cast at double, and at times triple, the speeds of the current PS5 console.”

The PS5 Pro also includes Sony’s new AI-powered PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) feature, which is essentially an upscaling technique similar to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR to improve frame rates and image quality for PlayStation games. This custom PSSR upscaling is designed to replace a game’s existing temporal anti-aliasing or upsampling implementation.

Cerny briefly demonstrated a few games running on the PS5 Pro, including The Last of Us Part II with more detail while still targeting 60fps instead of the 30fps fidelity mode on PS5. Sony’s goal of fidelity-like graphics at performance frame rates will be available in games like Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. 

Sony is also including a PS5 Pro “Game Boost” option, which will apply to more than 8,500 backward-compatible PS4 games for the PS5 Pro. “This feature may stabilize or improve the performance of supported PS4 and PS5 games,” says Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s platform business group. “Enhanced Image Quality for PS4 games is also available to improve the resolution on select PS4 games.”

The PS5 Pro will also support Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, VRR, and 8K resolutions, and CNET’s Scott Stein, who got an early hands-on with the console, says it now comes with a larger 2TB solid-state drive and swaps one of its rear USB-A ports for an extra USB-C port instead. It’ll also still include an extra SSD slot for expansion, too, he says.

Games will need to be patched to take advantage of some of the PS5 Pro’s features, and Sony says developers are readying free software updates to existing titles that will be labeled as PS5 Pro Enhanced games — up to 50 of them by its November 7th launch, according to CNET.

The first PS5 Pro Enhanced games will include Alan Wake 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Demon’s Souls, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Gran Turismo 7, Hogwarts Legacy, Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, The Crew Motorfest, The First Descendant, and The Last of Us Part II Remastered.

Of the initial batch of titles, most should now simply feature 4K resolution and 60fps frame rate, but CNET also got to try Gran Turismo 7 in a new 8K mode and a 4K ray-tracing mode. Developers can also reportedly add volumetric lighting or even show you more characters in the background of a scene.

The PS5 Pro is also compatible with the PlayStation VR2 headset — where Cerny told CNET it would eventually support higher-resolution games — the PlayStation Portal handheld, and existing PS5 controllers. Sony says it’s not changing the UI or network services for the PS5 Pro, so those will be identical to the existing console.

Preorders for the PS5 Pro will start on September 26th, ahead of the launch at retailers on November 7th.