Sony announces PS5 Pro with larger GPU, advanced ray tracing and AI upscaling

The PS5 Pro is official. After months of leaks, Sony just announced a more powerful PS5 console during a special technical presentation. Mark Cerny, the lead architect of the PS5 console, says the PS5 Pro improves on the original console in three key ways: a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and custom AI-driven upscaling.

The PS5 Pro will launch on November 7th for $699.99 and looks very similar to the Slim version of the PS5 – just as recent leaks suggested. It has three stripes on the side and comes without a disc drive.

The hardware upgrades inside will result in 45 percent faster rendering, according to Cerny, and improve the detail of certain games and frame rates. One of the main reasons for the PS5 Pro is that PS5 Pro players won't have to choose between performance modes and fidelity modes. “Players choose performance about three-quarters of the time,” Cerny says.

Sony has upgraded the PS5 Pro's GPU with 67 percent more processing units than the current PS5 console and also has 28 percent faster memory. All of this results in 45 percent faster game playback.

This extra power is intended to improve ray tracing games. Sony says developers will be able to “expose the rays at twice and sometimes three times the speed of the current PS5 console.”

The PS5 Pro also includes Sony's new AI-powered PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) feature, which is essentially an upscaling technique similar to Nvidia's DLSS or AMD's FSR to improve frame rates and image quality for PlayStation games. This custom PSSR upscaling is designed to replace a game's existing temporal anti-aliasing or upsampling implementation.