If you want to buy a PlayStation 5 Pro with disc drive and stand, you have to spend 950 euros: that’s still a little less than a comparably equipped gaming PC, but it’s still extremely expensive for a game console. The c’t 3003 shows what you get for the money.
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Transcript of the video
(Note: This transcript is for those who cannot or do not want to watch the above video. The text does not reflect all of the information in the image track.)
Look here, there is a number on the screen: 799. Yes, and this is the euro price for Sony’s new game console PS5 Pro. And this price, I cannot say otherwise, is a provocation. Look at that Average console prices in recent years were – And 800 euros, that’s a lot. Especially when you consider that four years ago, many people considered 500 euros for the original PS5 to be expensive. So, and now here’s the kicker: 800 euros for the PS5 Pro won’t get you the drive or the stand. What? Okay, so the PS5 Pro should have some amazing features? Yes, which ones we explain exactly in this video, without any nonsense. Stay tuned!
Dear hackers, dear internet surfers, welcome here…
So, well, after months of rumors, Sony has now announced the PS5 Pro in a 9-minute livestream. The most surprising thing was obviously the price, yes, 799 euros without the drive and stand, both of which were included in the basic version of the PS5, at the time for 499 euros. So if you want the PS5 Pro with drive and stand, it costs 950 euros.
And if someone comes along now, oh, who needs discs in 2024, because nobody uses them on PC anymore: Just one example, the Sony first-party title Spiderman 2 costs 79.99 euros in the PlayStation online store, the disc version is available from retailers starting at 45 euros. Small difference, right? You can even buy and sell used disc versions, which is not possible digitally.
So, now we’ve explained the expensive aspect enough, so now it’s the very important one: what can this thing do? Yes, Sony’s marketing promise can be summarized like this: with the PS5 Pro you can run the highest quality graphics mode, which the PS5 manages more easily, at 60fps, i.e. at only 30fps. It’s now the case with most games that you can set whether you want a reliable 60fps (often called “Performance mode”) or the best possible quality with ray tracing and all the bells and whistles, but only possible at 30fps (Fidelity mode). Now the promise is: Fidelity mode with 60fps.
In my opinion, this was actually the most interesting statement of PlayStation chief developer Mark Cerny’s presentation: According to Sony’s data, three quarters of gamers use performance mode, which means that a smooth 60 FPS is more important to them than the best image quality. And even more extraordinary: that Cerny has explicitly stated that 30 FPS is “choppy”, i.e. jerky. After decades the entire video game industry has been claiming that 30 FPS is perfectly adequate. And, no, 30 FPS is simply annoying – that’s why I’ve never played Bloodborne, for example: as long as there is no 60 FPS mode, I won’t touch it.
Disney in court over CGI resurrections of dead Star Wars actorsBefore we get to the hard hardware facts, here are a few things I found surprising about the Sony presentation:
1. There was no mention of the PSVR2 virtual reality headset, although more power would be very useful, especially for VR. Unfortunately, you can conclude from this: PSVR2 is no longer incredibly relevant to Sony, and I wouldn’t expect any major new game titles. In front of CNET Mark Cerny at least said that hardware improvements will enable better PSVR2 graphics quality and that AI upscaling will also work on PSVR2. Yes, well, in concrete terms it works differently.
2. There were generally no game announcements for any new titles that could in some way make particularly great use of the PS5 Pro.
3. The presentation only showed PS5 Pro improvements in older games – and if I’m honest, I couldn’t really see any improvements in many places, but okay, that could also be due to YouTube video compression. But it’s obvious: I wasn’t like: wow, crazy, how much better it looks, but just, hmm, yeah, okay, a little smoother.
Yes, and this is probably also due to the hardware, which hasn’t gotten much better:
According to Sony, the main focus was on the graphics unit. According to official information, it now has 67% more compute units and 28% faster GDDR6 memory. All this together brings 45% more speed. So these are the marketing details.
If you rely on the various leaks, the following technical data emerges – but, as I said, this is not a Sony data sheet, but data cobbled together from leaks.
Interestingly, the architecture has also been upgraded, so instead of AMD’s RDNA 2 there is now a mix of RDNA 3 and RDNA 4. This is specifically aimed at improving ray tracing calculations. The total transfer rate of the fast memory should increase from 448 to 576 GB/s, that’s pretty much official.
The CPU remains largely the same, the CPU cores also remain at the technical level of Ryzen 3000 processors with Zen 2 architecture. However, this is not such a big problem, since current consoles are practically always limited by the GPU. There should be a small boost with a higher clock frequency of up to 350 MHz. It is unknown what manufacturing process the new PS5 Pro processor uses to roll off the assembly line. It has also improved: by default, the PS5 Pro gets 2 TB of SSD storage instead of 825 GB like the PS5.
Otherwise there is another concrete improvement; namely an AI unit that supports the new upscaling PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) – the equivalent of Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) or FSR 3.0 from AMD. Brief description: With this technology, the graphics unit can calculate images in a lower resolution, which are then upscaled to a higher resolution with the help of AI – in the best case, it looks as good as if the graphics were calculated in the target resolution from the start. The advantage is that the graphics unit is relieved because it does not have to calculate as many pixels, and this increases the frame rate, making the image smoother. It certainly has game-changer potential – but unfortunately we don’t know anything concrete about it so far.
my conclusion
So I love PlayStation consoles and I have owned all the consoles released by Sony in the last few years – but with the PS5 Pro, yes, I’m not really convinced yet, it may be the only one I don’t keep under the television. There are still two months to go until the launch, it’s coming out on November 7th. Maybe Sony will pull something concrete out of its plan. But the prospect of seeing older games, many of which I’ve played for a long time, in slightly better image quality and frame rates, yes, well, hmm, so I’m not spending 800 or even 950 euros on that. However, what you have to say to save Sony’s honor is: a comparable full PC, that is roughly a computer with an AMD Radeon 7700 XT graphics card, would be – and the graphics card alone costs 400 euros. This means that a comparably fast PC would definitely cost more. Well, of course the PC can do a lot more; But a game console is less complex and has specific titles; so it’s all a matter of opinion, but one thing is still clear: the PS5 Pro is extremely expensive for a game console. Or do you see it differently? Feel free to write and comment in the comments, we read everything. Bye!
No 3003 This is not a YouTube channel. The videos on C’T 3003 are independent content and are independent of the articles in C’T magazine. Editors Jan-Keno Janssen and Lukas Rumpler as well as video producers Sahin Erengil and Pascal Chevé publish a video every week.
(JKJ)
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