The PS5 Pro has been rumored for over a year now and turned out to be exactly what most people expected: a similar-looking machine that runs games with incrementally better graphics and performance. The only thing people weren’t expecting was the $US700 price tag, and the sticker shock has turned some pretty straightforward discussions about the trade-offs of upgrading into a weirdly heated proxy fight over seemingly unrelated issues.
Sony system architect Mark Cerny introduced the PS5 Pro earlier this week with a series of comparison shots between games running on the existing hardware and on the new machine. The differences were hard to discern, especially through compressed YouTube video footage, but the bullet points sounded good: a GPU that’s 45 percent faster at rendering gameplay, advanced ray tracing that improves lighting speeds by double or even triple, and AI-driven upscaling called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) to further improve image clarity and detail. But once the price tag was revealed, sticker shock took over and largely drowned out more nuanced conversations about the new device.
How much better will games look on PS5 Pro?
It’s easy to understand why. $US700 is a lot to spend on a video game console, and adjusted for inflation is the third-highest price Sony has charged for a new console. And the company’s presentation did it no favors in trying to sell players on the virtues of making a PS5 Pro their next big gaming purchase. Cerny’s presentation showed old games, including the next-gen port of The Last of Us Part II which originally came out on the PS4. There was no new game running in 4K at 60fps to wow fans, and the differences with smoothness and background detail were hard to detect over the internet. Weirdly, only one outlet, CNET, seemed to have been invited to test the new hardware in-person.
It wasn’t until some experts started looking at direct, lossless renders of the PS5 Pro gameplay footage that the improvements left a larger impression. “Wow, yeah, FF7R looks a LOT better on PS5 Pro,” tweeted Digital Foundry’s John Linneman a couple of days after the initial reveal. “Night and day difference. I actually put off playing it due to other things happening at the time of release but the Pro will finally push me to enjoy it. Image quality was just too awful on normal PS5.”
The lowkey comment ignited a firestorm of replies and quote-tweets slamming the PS5 Pro and the critique of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s existing graphics on the base PS5. Which was weird, because the way that Square Enix’s sprawling RPG looked gorgeous when static but choppy in motion was widely covered at launch. If anything, it’s an ideal test case for the PS5 Pro upgrade: a third party game struggling to hold things together within the current limitations of the launch hardware.
A comparable PC is more expensive than people think
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is also the type of game that will be coming to PC in the future, where on higher-end machines it will likely look even better than on PS5 Pro. But how much will those gaming rigs cost relative to what Sony’s offering? We don’t have the full official specs for the PS5 Pro yet, but builds on sites like PCPartPicker run the gamut from a little more expensive to a lot more expensive.
For example, a barebones PC build by IGN trying to match the SSD storage and GPU power arrived at an estimated cost of around $US930. Not bad for a machine that has access to Steam sales, Epic Games Store freebies, and doesn’t require you to pay a monthly subscription for online multiplayer. But other more conservative estimates put the price much higher. A custom build by Techradar estimated the cost at closer to $US1,200, and that’s not even including a DualSense controller to get the most out of first-party Sony games once they’re ported to PC. Even that number might be low-baling it, though.
“Probably a fair bit more,” Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter told IGN in a recent interview when asked how much a comparable PC would cost. “If you consider the holistic view of all the different components, the enhanced ray tracing—no AMD GPU has that at the moment—the machine learning block—no AMD GPU has that—it’s almost like essentially an Nvidia-style feature set but made by AMD and the closest equivalent GPU you’ll be locking at would be the RTX 4070. The 4060 is quite close to base PlayStation 5, factoring out machine learning and ray tracing, so you’re looking at a 4070.”
The cheapest versions of those GPUs often run over $US500, with costs “ramping up” from there after including the 2TB SSD, motherboard, case, and other required PC parts. Leadbetter stressed that the PS5 Pro price is still “crazy,” but that the math is a little more complicated, in addition to the product being largely pitched at existing PlayStation users who are unlikely to want to jump to PC and leave their existing game libraries behind. He also noted that the hardware jump from the PS5 to the PS5 Pro is smaller this time around than when Sony showcased the move from PS4 to PS4 Pro, which he largely blamed on an industry-wide struggle to bring down the costs of higher-performing tech.
What’s the PS5 Pro hate really about?
Not everyone believes that Sony is putting its best foot forward with the PS5 Pro price. An opinion video on the reveal by LinusTechTips blamed it in part on a lack of competition in the high-end console space. With PS5 reportedly outselling the Xbox Series X/S two-to-one, and a Switch 2 still not ready for primetime, the YouTube channel argues that there’s less pressure on Sony to cut its profit margins on the PS5 Pro and try to bring it in at a more appealing price point.
There’s some analysis to back up this argument. “With no comparable mid-gen upgrade from Microsoft, and Nintendo’s upcoming console expected to be less powerful than the base PS5, Sony is positioning the PS5 Pro as a premium offering for console gamers seeking superior graphics performance at a somewhat accessible price compared to high-end PCs,” wrote Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners, in a recent thread on the topic.
With the console aimed squarely at existing PS5 owners locked into a living room gaming setup, the Pro offers Sony the chance to sell the most powerful console on the market at an audience of “price insensitive” users willing to spend extra. “Manufacturing costs, including component prices such as for SSDs, continued to remain high post pandemic and have squeezed hardware margins,” Ahmad wrote. “The lack of overall console install base expansion from prior gens has also led to platform holders maximizing spend per user and expanding beyond console.”
Even if the Pro makes business sense for Sony, it doesn’t do anything to assuage the growing frustration with the PlayStation platform this console generation. While the PS4 era was typified by lower-cost debut hardware and the coming-online of a first-party studio system aimed at churning out one mega blockbuster after another, the PS5 era is synonymous with higher prices and a feeling of less innovation and experimentation. Astro Bot is a shiny exception in a sea of first-party sequels that felt impressive but bloated compared to the novelty of their PS4-era predecessors.
Where are the brand-new Sony franchises? Where are the PS5 blockbusters pushing the envelope not just on graphics but in terms of storytelling, mechanics, and design? Instead of a big 2024 PlayStation showcase blowing them away, fans got Concord, a live-service also-ran so out of sync with the player base that Sony unceremoniously unreleased it inside of a month. In some ways Sony is a victim of its own success, and the lofty expectations that now accompany it. And so far the only thing that feels extraordinary about the PS5 Pro is its price.
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