After some very unpopular moves lately, Sony has finally dropped a welcome surprise on their fans: the eagerly awaited PS5 Pro. While most of what they covered was fairly predictable—we've seen this one before—there was one big surprise too bad it was a bad one: the $700 price. By the time you buy a stand sold separately, this thing is dangerously close to double the price of a base PS5 and darn near what the average American is spending on their car payment. But in my characteristic way, here comes an unpopular take: while I'm disappointed by the cost and I want gaming to be accessible to everyone, I don't think we should be that shocked. Adjusting for inflation, this isn't even Sony's most expensive console, and with the serious lack of competition in both the gaming GPU space—not to mention the bigger lack of competition in the console space—I feel like this was sort of inevitable. Just like our sponsor Ridge, their massive Hennessy sweepstakes is now live, and you can win a Hennessy Velociraptor, a gold-plated cyber.

truck or $100,000 cash. All you need to do is use our link to get a free entry and get one bonus entry with every dollar you spend. I can't believe this is a conversation we're having, but PS5 Gamers, what would you rather do? Spend $700 on a new single-purpose closed ecosystem box that requires a subscription to connect online with a frankly pretty short list of true exclusives, or upgrade your PC with the excellent Radeon 7900 XT? That's right, those are the same price. And even if you don't have a PC, how about a killer secondhand machine with a brand new 7800 XT? It's the same $700 price. What is going on here? Consoles used to absolutely slam PCs when it comes to gaming value, and what's really funny here is they still do. This is something we explored very recently in our PS5 killer video, where we did kind of kill it, but only by cutting some pretty big corners. So then Sony, in order to justify

the PS5 Pro. You better have something seriously impressive under the hood. Let's take a look. The TL;DR of the presentation is what Sony broke down into the big three. And number one is more RAW graphics rendering power. They have dramatically increased the number of compute units, or CUs, from 36 to 60. That levels up the GPU from about equivalent to a 5-year-old card to being on par with something modern, with Sony promising a 45% uplift. But bigger GPU doesn't tell the whole story here, 'cause number two is two to three times better ray tracing performance. And that's the one that's most interesting to me personally. Back when Sony was designing the PS5, AMD was realistically generations behind Nvidia when it came to real-time ray-traced lighting. And while they haven't closed the gap yet, at least on their GPUs, Sony disclosed that the PS5 Pro will use a ray tracing engine that AMD has not yet shown us in their own GPU lineup. So, these two things alone could be a pretty

strong one punch to drive 4K frame rates up to 60 FPS while simultaneously improving visual fidelity. And we're not done yet. Number three is a new machine learning upscaling technology they're calling PlayStation spectral super resolution. Based on the name, it's safe to say that we're looking at something similar to Nvidia's DLSS, which allows a game to be rendered at a lower resolution, then upscaled using a model that was trained on higher resolution renders. I can actually imagine this working really well on the PS5 Pro, thanks to the predictable hardware platform, not to mention the relatively smaller number of games to train it on. But of course, that's all speculation on my part since Sony was very light on the details, which was kind of a theme of the whole presentation. Sony may have called this a technical presentation, but when you compare it to the nearly hour-long and legitimately deeply technical briefing that they gave us back in 2020, I'm feeling a little bit like they got the color wrong on their iconic ball-shaped

button for starters. It was less than 10 minutes long, and that included the parts where Mark Cy was narrating over gameplay footage of remarkably older titles. I mean, in fairness, I guess it is a pretty simple sales pitch that PS5 Pro owners will no longer need to choose between the fidelity of a high-resolution mode or the smoothness of a performance mode, with the juice to give you the best of both worlds at once, or at least like both worlds, with graphics showing something like fidelity levels of detail. To be clear, I respect that Sony is setting very realistic expectations. Like the PS4 Pro, this is not a new generation product; it's a mid-cycle upgrade. And based on the now substantiated leaks from earlier this year, it looks like it's almost entirely focused on the GPU. Both the CPU and the SSD look to be nearly identical in terms of performance to the base model, all of which makes a lot of sense. I mean, it'd be pretty dumb to push a big architectural change that might cause compatibility issues, but as

a technophile. It also just felt like a bit of a letdown to spend the first 10% of the presentation going through the six key features of the original PS5. If you're going to ultimately leave two-thirds of them untouched, and the two that you did upgrade are pretty much the same thing. Speaking of letdowns, no one buys PlayStations for the hardware, guys. So what are they doing showing off a new console without any new games? I think a lot of the online anger would have been mitigated if this presentation was punctuated with some gameplay of a new visually enticing title that isn't going to be recalled two weeks later. I mean, we've jokingly referred to the PS5 as the PS4 more Pro because some of the best PS5 experiences are just PS4 games running at higher frame rates. And so I guess with no new games to speak of, we're stuck calling the PS5 Pro the PS4 more prer. All of which is fine, I guess, if it wasn't for that big sticking point.

the price, but again, I think it's an expectation problem. The PS4 Pro, when it launched, was $400, just $100 more than its contemporary slim model, and by the way, equal to the regular PS4's launch price. When Sony did that, they set an expectation that the console will go down in price and the pro will slot in to replace it, an expectation that's no longer realistic. The PS5 has grown up in a very different economic reality than its predecessors, and the cold hard truth is that while Sony's hardware costs have fallen, electronics manufacturing doesn't get cheaper nearly the way that it used to. Combine that with some other recent business challenges, and Sony might just not be in the mood to take big losses on hardware with the assumption they're going to make it up in the near future on games. So, with that in mind, it looks to me like they're just keeping the margin structure pretty much flat and giving us about 250 bucks worth of bigger SSD and GPU for about 250 bucks.

so what do you want? Well, more competition probably. I mean, if Microsoft was bringing their game or the Switch 2 existed, Sony might be willing to get more aggressive. But as it is now, they have not only not bothered to drop pricing on the original PS5, they've actually increased pricing in some regions. And with Sony leading the market, I don't see that changing anytime soon. So what's the good news? Well, if you watched the side-by-side footage and you couldn't tell the difference, you're not alone. And that's kind of good news. If the visual upgrades don't mean that much to you, you can just save 250 bucks and still buy the base model. The PS5 really is still, four years later, a great machine for the price. David, the writer for this video, has hundreds of hours on his, and I think that's exactly who Sony is targeting. David, are you going to buy one? Yeah, predictable. I can't say that I agree with the decision, but I can't control what people spend their paychecks on. What I can control is

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Why the PS5 Pro is $700

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