Sony wants you to pay way too much for the PS5 Pro

PlayStation 5 Pro and DualSense controller

Pictured: PlayStation 5 Pro and DualSense controller

// Tell him he's dreamin'

Brodie Fogg
Sep 11, 2024
Icon Time To Read3 min read

Sony has revealed its souped-up PlayStation 5 Pro (PS5 Pro) during a live stream hosted by lead architect, Mark Cerny.

Releasing this November, the PS5 Pro features 2TB of SSD storage, an updated GPU, WiFi 7 support, AI-powered 4K upscaling, better ray tracing and no disc drive.

Most astounding, though, is Sony's confidence in the PS5 Pro, which can be observed via the $1,199.95 price tag. That is just shy of the iPhone 16, which was announced roughly 22 hours prior.

PS5 Pro price and release date in Australia

The PS5 Pro will cost nearly $1,200 in Australia.
PlayStation 5 Pro

As the mid-generation update for the PlayStation 5 (PS5,) the PS5 Pro will play all the same games as the standard PS5 that was released in November 2020— it will just be a little better at playing those games. 

The PS5 Pro will cost $1,199.95 in Australia when it launches on Thursday the 7th of November 2024. Pre-orders go live on Thursday the 26th of September through 

The PS5 Pro doesn't come with a disc drive, though it is compatible with PlayStation's $159 modular Console Disc Drive that was released with the PS5 Slim. With that said, the PS5 Disc Drive isn't exactly abundant in stock in Australia; PlayStation's Amazon store is currently out of stock. So if you do need a disc drive and you're planning on getting the PS5 Pro, it's probably safest to buy a Disc Drive ahead of time, wherever you can get it. 

PS5 Pro vs PS5: What's new?

  • Better GPU: With 67% more compute units (?)
  • Double storage: The PS5 Pro will come with 2TB of internal SSD storage
  • Faster memory: The PS5 Pro sports the same 16GB GDDR6 unified RAM but according to Sony the read speeds are increased thanks to the GPU upgrade
  • AI 4K upscaling: The PS5 Pro will have its own version of NVIDIA's 4K upscaling technology, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling,) which Sony is calling PSSR or PlayStation Spacial Super Resolution. It's a bespoke technology designed to work with the PS5 Pro's AMD-based architecture. It's impressive tech (well, DLSS is at least,) that uses artificial intelligence to upscale video fidelity in real-time. As a software solution, and not a hardware job, this lightens the load on the GPU, leaving more room for other intensive tasks, like maintaining a higher frame rate. Don't set your expectations too high, even the official PS5 Pro announcement only hopes for better fidelity at 60FPS, despite the console trailer vaguely promising better 120FPS performance
  • No disc drive: Despite the massive price increase, the PS5 Pro only comes as a Digital-Only console. Those who would like to use their physical library of Blu-ray PS5 discs would need to spend an extra $159 on a PS5 Disc Drive to do so (and that's if they can even find one for sale.) That ups the overall price for physical media fans to $1,358.95. 
  • No vertical stand: You will also pay extra for the kickstand if you want to store your PS5 Pro upright. Cool.

Naturally, you're probably thinking about what that kind of money gets you. Sony hasn't released a comprehensive list of technical specs for the PS5 Pro yet, so you will simply have to trust that Sony wouldn't screw you over with empty promises. 

During the 10-minute announcement stream (of which many minutes were dedicated to celebrating the base PS5,) Cerny commented on a few of the upgrades but held back on solid promises about real-life improvements. He spoke a lot about increasing the fidelity in 'Performance Mode' and increasing the frame rate in 'Quality Mode' but never about eliminating the need for a choice. Just that the bad parts of both options will, hopefully, be a little better.

Cerny did comment on the fact that the data shows that most PS5 players opt for performance, so it's likely that the focus will be on improving fidelity for high-frame-rate players. 

If that shakes out then the PS5 Pro might be worth it in the long run but I would be waiting for the reviews to land before spending that much money. 

More compute units? Sick!

How many compute units could a computer compute if a computer could compute compute units?

Did you know Sony has sold over 50 million PlayStation 5 consoles since it first released in November 2020?

That's a lot. It's not even close to PlayStation 2 (over 155 million) or Nintendo Switch (over 140 million) but it's a lot.

How many of those 50 million people would you estimate would spend almost $1.2K for 67% more compute units in their PS5? Just curious.

write about video games and video game consoles and that figure means jack to me. And that's the feature Sony led with to sell their PlayStation 5 Pro which costs almost twice as much as the regular, very powerful PS5.

According to IBM, "Compute units encode cluster network topology for jobs with a lot of communication between processes—" that sounds like every PS5 owner's dream.

All jokes aside, 'compute units' isn't a defined metric like frames-per-second or gigabytes. It's a very loose way of quantifying the computational power you're selling and can mean something different to different manufacturers.

I'm sure the folks at Sony PlayStation have an idea of what that metric means to them, but to the consumer, 67% more compute units is impossible to quantify without more information.

The PS5 Pro could be the console of your dreams but it's impossible to say based on the limited information we have. 

I can't emphasise this enough: Wait for the reviews before pre-ordering the PS5 Pro.

Brodie Fogg
Written by
Brodie Fogg is the Australian editorial lead at Reviews.org. He has covered consumer tech, telecommunications, video games, streaming and entertainment for over five years at websites like WhistleOut and Finder and can be found sharing streaming recommendations at 7NEWS every month.

Related Articles

The Franchise header
When (and how) to watch The Franchise
Superhero movies have gotten so big that they're getting the Silicon Valley treatment.