The PS5 Pro is the most powerful games console ever released, but at $700 PC gaming has nothing to worry about

HardwareThe PS5 Pro is the most powerful games console ever released, but at $700 PC gaming has nothing to worry aboutWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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PS5 Pro Technical Presentation hosted by Mark Cerny - YouTube

It was billed as merely being a ‘Sony technical presentation’ focusing on the PlayStation 5 and “innovations in gaming technology,” but with all therumours building up over the months,we all knew what it was going to be about and it didn’t disappoint. Mark Cerny, the lead architect of the PS5, spent 10 minutes spilling some of the details about the PS5 Pro.

However, big things were expected of the GPU and true to the rumours, it’s a much beefier affair. Where thePlayStation 5has an RDNA 2-based graphics processor, with 36 compute units and 16 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6, the Pro wades in with 60 compute units (almost certainly RDNA 3-based) and 18 Gbps GDDR6. Exact clock speeds haven’t been announced yet but given the size of the chip, they’re likely to be a bit lower.

Along with the normalRDNA 3features, the PS5 Pro GPU also has improved ray tracing units (Cerny said “two or three times faster” but take that with a pinch of salt) and then there’s PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution Upscaling (PSSR), which is an AI-accelerated upscaler, akin to DLSS and XeSS. Earlier rumours also claimed the new GPU has full hardware support formesh shaders and variable rate shading, making the chip on par with today’s PC graphics cards.

Taking all of that on board, one is clearly left with a serious powerful games console. Those 60 compute units might not be clocked as high as the 60 in theRadeon RX 7800 XTbut it’s one heck of an increase over the original PS5. However, I don’t think there will be any L3 Infinity Cache to ease the load on the VRAM, so that modest increase in memory bandwidth is going to be quite a performance limit in some cases. For sheer compute work, though, it’ll be a monster.

Swipe to scroll horizontallyPS5 Pro vs PS5 specificationsHeader Cell - Column 0PS5 ProPS5CPUZen 2 (unconfirmed)Zen 2Cores/threads8/168/16GPURDNA 3 (unconfirmed)RDNA 2Compute Units6036Memory18 Gbps GDDR614 Gbps GDDR6MSRP (at launch)$700$499 / $399

Swipe to scroll horizontally

PS5 Pro vs PS5 specificationsHeader Cell - Column 0PS5 ProPS5CPUZen 2 (unconfirmed)Zen 2Cores/threads8/168/16GPURDNA 3 (unconfirmed)RDNA 2Compute Units6036Memory18 Gbps GDDR614 Gbps GDDR6MSRP (at launch)$700$499 / $399

So console gamers get a lovely new machine to buy (provided they’re willing to cough up the steep $700 price, of course) but does the launch of the PS5 Pro mean anything for PC gaming? On face value, the answer would seem to be no, as the number of units that Sony will sell is going to be tiny in comparison to the millions of PS5s it’s already shifted.

Few game developers, if any, are going to make a gamejustfor the PS5 Pro but many of the bigger studios are adding something special for the Pro, either in the form of more performance or just better graphics.

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A screenshot from a Sony presentation announcing the PS5 Pro