Sony PlayStation 5 Pro announced ahead of GTA 6 release

Ever since the first GTA 6 trailer dropped almost a year ago in December 2023, rumours of a more powerful Sony PlayStation 5 being in the pipeline have been surfacing. While we did get a more compact new Sony PlayStation 5 Slim later on in the summer, the console wasn’t exactly more powerful, with the only upgrade being more storage. Well, all that changes now.

Sony has finally surprised the PlayStation community with a surprise announcement of the new Sony PlayStation 5 Pro. The new Sony PS5 Pro comes with a promise of better gaming performance, along with a beefy price tag. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

Sony PlayStation 5 Pro: What’s new?

The Sony PlayStation 5 Pro comes with a slightly tweaked external design. Remember the diagonal body line of the PS5 Slim? There’s three of them now, and that’s pretty much the only way to tell the PS5 Pro apart. Thankfully, the performance upgrades aren’t so subtle.

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The Sony PlayStation 5 Pro comes with a bigger GPU with 67 per cent more Compute Units, and 28 per cent faster memory. In layman’s terms, that should translate to better performance in games compared to the standard PS5, with frame rates going up.

Sony also mentions that the PS5 Pro comes with improved ray tracing performance, that allows individual rays to be cast up to three times faster than the speed of the current PS5. Another major improvement is the storage – the PS5 Pro now has 2TB SSD storage, twice as much as the PS5 Slim.

Sony PlayStation 5 Pro will also introduce AI-powered upscaling, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. Similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS or Intel’s XeSS tech, the feature will allow the console to add intelligent, AI-generated detail to frames for better image clarity.

AI-powered frame generation and super sampling always gave games like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered and Cyberpunk 2077 an edge when these titles would eventually port over to PCs. Now, console players too will be able to leverage this tech for better image quality.

Sony PlayStation 5 Pro: No disc drive

The Sony PlayStation 5 Pro is also the first in the series to not feature a disc drive variant – choosing to go completely digital instead. While this may simplify the buying dilemma for some, having a disc option would have been great for those who like to trade discs once they’re done playing a game – not to mention the disc version of the console actually doubling up as a Blu-Ray media player for others.

The Sony PlayStation 5 Pro will be priced at $699 (approximately Rs 58,700) which marks a sizeable markup over the current PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Slim. While we have no India pricing yet, expect the number to be more than its USD equivalent.

Sony will make the console available later this year from November 7, so anyone waiting for their console upgrade ahead of GTA 6, or anyone looking for the perfect $700 Christmas gift may have the perfect present – assuming you can actually manage to get your hands on one at launch!