Sony announces PS5 Pro, a $700 graphics workhorse available Nov. 7

Enlarge / The cool racing stripe means it’s faster. (credit: Sony)

Sony today announced the PlayStation 5 Pro, a mid-generation hardware upgrade that will play the same game library as 2020’s PlayStation 5, but with higher frame rates and better resolutions than the original system could handle. The new units will be available on November 7 for $699.99, Sony announced.

In a video presentation Tuesday, Sony’s Mark Cerny said the PS5 Pro seeks to eliminate the decision between the higher resolution of “fidelity” mode and the smoother frame rates of “performance” mode. The goal, according to Cerny, is delivering “the graphics game makers aspire to at the high frame rates players prefer.”

To do this, the new system will sport a larger GPU that is “up to 45% faster rendering,” Cerny said, with 67 percent more compute units and 28 percent faster video RAM. This will allow for “almost fidelity-like graphics at ‘performance’ frame rates” of 60 frames per second in many existing PS5 games, Cerny said.