Yes, we’re talking about games consoles again. Don’t worry, we know this isn’t Maximum PlayStation, but with the arrival of the PS5 Pro and its radical shift upwards in pricing, it got us thinking about our console cousins and just how wildly different the two ecosystems are.
As you’ll have surmised from our build feature, trying to cram that much power into such a small form factor in the PC enthusiast’s world, at an identical price, is both impractical and kind of impossible.
Sony might have bumped that $ figure skyward, but in many ways, it’s justifiable, certainly if the GPU is as close to the RX 7600 XT as we suspect it may be. Nonetheless, we’re not about to tell you it’s that clear-cut, that the console finally has the upper hand, and we should all be swapping our custom-built $3,000 systems for a PS5 Pro, keyboard, and mouse. Nope, we’re going to take a deep dive into the PS5 Pro, have a look at where it’s at, how it’s taking advantage of modern-day tech to hit that 8K marketing buzzword, and figure out where the future of gaming is going.
–ZAK STOREY
Sony is introducing its own upscaling in the form of PSSR, probably a derivative of AMD’s FSR.
The enigmatic PS5 Pro
The PS5 Pro has finally been announced. It’s technically the third iteration of the PlayStation 5, following the initial launch in 2020, and its pseudo-refresh, the PS5 Slim, that landed in 2023.
Here’s the thing, though: We haven’t had a huge amount of information about the plucky new Pro console, only a few snippets of data from press conferences, all of which are rather ambiguous. So, what are the top-line specs?
Well, we know the CPU is probably the same, as there was no mention of any upgrade in the official announcement, so that’s likely an AMD Ryzen Zen 2 chip. That’ll come with eight cores, 16 threads, and a 3.5GHz clock speed. This is a custom model, built specifically for the PS5, based on the Ryzen 3000 series processors. It’s not too dissimilar from the Ryzen 7 3700X, just with a lower TDP and clock speed.