PS5 Pro price, performance, and what it means for next generation

So, the PlayStation 5 Pro has been revealed, and brought with it a lot of cutlery-based exclamations from gamers over the price tag. £700 for a beefed up PS5… and that’s without a disc drive? Needless to say, the overwhelming reaction has been pretty negative. But will it really matter to Sony’s bottom line? And what does it say about the next generation of consoles?

The main hurdle that the PS5 Pro has, compared to the PS4 Pro, is that it’s not selling a new technology. In 2016 Sony could tie in with the rise of 4K TVs and, making use of the early upscaling technique of checkerboarding, could make a compelling case that the PS4 Pro would give you 4K or close to it. The end results were a good bit below that, often topping out at 1440p, but this was also the advent of graphics modes to let you choose to run games at standard resolution and with higher frame rates – Rise of the Tomb Raider being an early example of this – and shore up performance in games that struggled on base PS4.

And it’s performance mode that has come to dominate gaming habits in the last few years, as Mark Cerny pointes out early in his presentation. Gamers just want 60FPS, coming up against developers who want and need to push graphical fidelity as far as possible, and also to hit a particular release date that’s been handed down to them. There’s plenty of games that launch with only 30FPS modes, before a 60FPS mode and other optimised options are patched in down the line.

That’s not even mentioning the slightly blurry elephant in the room: upscaling. The use of DLSS, FSR and XeSS has skyrocketed in the last few years, various techniques that try to fill in the blanks using previous frames as reference points, to varying degrees of quality. They allow games to run at lower actual resolutions while outputting 4K, being used as a necessary crutch alongside dynamic resolutions to keep frame rates steady, even at 30FPS. Without dedicated hardware support in PS5 or Xbox Series, both have had to rely on AMD’s FSR, when DLSS has much higher quality. Sony’s answer here is their own custom PSSR solution.

Per Digital Foundry, Alan Wake 2 at launch ran at 1270p to upscale to 4K in quality mode, but drops that to 847p to upscale to 1440p in performance mode. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was a similar compromise, ranging from 1296p to 1800p in quality, or 864p to 1260p in performance.

So here’s the thing: even if PS5 Pro is able to combine quality and performance modes, we’re still well short of native 4K in both these games. Clarity will be improved, but that’s difficult to show in a heavily compressed YouTube video, even if you actually zoom in on images and don’t just crop them funny.

Developers will still be free to use console resources as they see fit, as well. Sony might want to get rid of graphics options, but in reality this is simply shifting the goal posts. You can bet good money that there will still be 30FPS modes in new and updated games, but they might now be a native 4K instead of 1440p-ish. Or developers will get to use the enhanced ray tracing capabilities, which will add a burden to the CPU which hasn’t been meaningfully improved, keeping us back at 30FPS again.

One of the most interesting aspects is how this can actually affect backward compatibility, with Sony saying that PS4 games could be enhanced using PSSR. Early generation games that were never made PS4 Pro compatible could suddenly get a free 4K upscale boost, getting a similar result to Microsoft’s code injection from Xbox backward compatibility, but in a very different way. The only caveat here is that this will be for “select” PS4 games.

But is that worth £700? That’s pricing that feels very much like a halo product, designed to appeal to the comparative few. It’s sure to sell out on day one, and I’d bet there’s at least 10 million people in the world who would consider and be able to afford this, but at the same time I can see it pushing many gamers to think about getting or upgrading a gaming PC instead. With more and more console exclusives coming to PC – whether at the same time for Xbox games, or a little down the road for PlayStation Studios games – that could be rather appealing.

Looking beyond the PS5 Pro and to the next generation, the $700 / £700 price tag is a pretty clear indication that we’re going to see another price hike for the PS6 and next Xbox. The PS5 and Xbox Series X both targeted $500 at launch in 2020, already a big $100 jump over the previous generation launch price, but where many would have expected that price to follow historical trends and gradually slide downward, it’s gone the opposite direction with the price actually increasing around the world in 2022. Even with release of the PS5 Slim, typically the point at which economies of scale and lowering component cost could enable a lower price, didn’t bring the price down. Heck, there were actually price increases for the digital edition in the US and Japan, and Japan has had yet another price hike since then.

Despite this, the PS5 has continued to sell at roughly the same pace as the PS4, and in a tougher economic climate.

Of course, this has also come at a time where general consumer electronics are going up and up in price. The iPhone 5S started at $650 in 2013, and the iPhone 7 was sticking to that price in 2016, but by 2020, the iPhone 12 started at $800 and iPhone 12 Pro at $1000, and that’s without talking about the plus size models and gouging storage options. There’s plenty of people willing to get the biggest and the best version of a phone.

Perhaps a better point of comparison is GPU costs. In 2013, the GeForce GTX 770 (the third tier GPU behind the GTX 780 and Titans of the day) was $399, now that third tier is the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, which debuted at $799 – and that only after Nvidia stepped back from backlash to the 4070 Ti being branded as a 4080 and costing $100 more.

Of course, there’s very different pressures for a new console generation than for an optional mid-gen bump and glory project. For the next generation, both Microsoft and Sony will have to weigh up the actual cost of manufacture against the need to build their audience as quickly as possible to make the generation profitable quickly, meaning they will probably start off by selling at a loss. However, with the rate of progress on die shrinks slowing as we approach 1nm, and so the ability to reduce costs also slowing, brace yourselves for at least a $600 starting price. Without a disc drive.