An improved and more technically impressive PlayStation 5 is on the way, but wow it won’t be cheap.
Gamers keen to have the best hardware to play the latest games almost always need to spend up, particularly in the PC gaming world, but that’s not always the case with consoles. Typically, consoles provide a locked in time effort, whereby game makers are matching their games specifically to what the console can do, delivering high quality visuals and sound based on what the hardware can do, matching it in the process.
Console lifespans vary, but the idea is you’ll be able to play the games at their best quality for several years as they come out.
In recent years, though, game hardware makers have been challenging that, releasing slightly more capable variations on that theme midway through the console’s life.
Take the PlayStation 5, for example: it was released back in 2020, and now four years later, Sony has a more impressive bit of hardware on the way in the PS5 Pro.
Similar but not quite the same, the PlayStation 5 Pro gets a new graphics chip providing boosts to the graphical capability, while also improving the memory, a result Sony says provides up to 45 percent faster rendering in gameplay.
The boosts also extend to ray-tracing, which in the new console will provide more rays and better looking graphics, all at sometimes triple the speed of what the current PlayStation 5 can do.
As it is, the current PS5 is already impressive enough, so to have this go the extra mile could make it just that much better, especially until the PlayStation 6 rolls around.
At the same time, Sony is working on building a better visual experience for new TVs, and this time it won’t just be a marketing slogan for the ads. In the PS5 Pro, Sony will introduce “PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution”, an AI-based approach to increasing quality on newer TVs, much like the upscaling current televisions get.
There are other features, too, such as game boost technology to improve the performance of backwards compatible PlayStation 4 games on the PS5 console, as well as WiFi 7 for faster online gameplay (provided you have a WiFi 7 router), and even support for 8K gaming in some instances.
One thing you won’t get in the package is the Ultra HD Blu-ray drive, which is now an optional extra. You can buy that and swap it into the console, but the PS5 Pro won’t arrive with an optical drive, suggesting digital downloads are the way of the future for Sony. Given there’s a 2TB drive inside the PlayStation 5 Pro, that should come as no surprise.
The PS5 Pro won’t be inexpensive, however, with a confirmed price of $1199 in Australia and availability in November. Yes, it appears Australia is back to the old days of super expensive consoles, though you can probably expect that to trickle down in the years to come. Maybe.
For now if you’re interested, you might want to start saving, because yikes… that’s a lot of money for slightly better graphics in games.
