I'm here at PlayStation headquarters with an exclusive hands-on of Sony's brand new PlayStation 5 Pro console that's coming out in November. Yes, I got to play a bunch of games on it. Here's what's going on. It's been 4 years since Sony released the PlayStation 5, which went by pretty fast in the middle of a pandemic, but the idea of next-generation kind of lingers in my head and probably for a lot of people. When do you buy a console? Well, Sony has had mid-range console upgrades in the past. The PlayStation 4 Pro came out 3 years after the PlayStation 4, and lo and behold, the PlayStation 5 Pro is coming out 4 years after the PlayStation 5 for $6.99. You're paying more, but not too much tremendously more compared to the PlayStation 5 that is already on the market and has an upgraded slimmer version. Compared side by side, it's also not that much larger. In fact, it's a little bit smaller than the PlayStation.

5 original, which is a nice surprise because the PlayStation 4 Pro was definitely bigger and thicker. What do you get? Well, there's no optical drive; you have to buy that separately. You can use the same optical drive that's available on the slim model and pop it in. And also, it may be that a lot of people choose to prefer the digital version now, considering that there's also Wi-Fi 7, and the size of the drive is now bumped up to 2 terabytes, which is the same speed as the SSD in the previous models, same CPU too, but the GPU is a lot beefier, supposed to be 67% more powerful and 38% faster, and it's going to provide better performance for all the games and a lot more things like ray tracing. There's also a big focus on upgrading the resolution of existing games. PlayStation spectral super resolution is the technology that uses an AI neural upscaling using a convolutional neural network to basically just make sure the games play really nicely in 4K and

speaking of 4K existing PlayStation 5 games, they always had two modes, which was either 1080p 60 frames per second or 4K at 30 frames per second. Sony's now offering a PR mode that glues both of those together, and so you're getting both 60 frames per second and 4K. Now, that's exactly what I would have wanted to play in the first place. If you're interested in doing things like 8K gaming or you want to do things like 120 frames per second, there are capabilities for games to do that, but those are going to be on a game-by-game basis. The real push here is for really nice 4K 60 frames per second across the board for your entire library. What does this mean for the future of PlayStation? I got to talk to Mark Cerny, lead systems architect for PlayStation, and Hidetaka Ninan, CEO of platform for Sony Interactive Entertainment. They talked about how, in a lot of ways, PC gaming right now is

providing a kind of an on-ramp for some of these technologies, but also allowing Sony to lead a bit with some things like ray tracing, where they're using an AMD-developed ray tracing technology that isn't even in existing GPUs. Some of that will kind of ride ahead, and other things like maybe more advanced graphics that you might be used to on PCs will finally have a chance to come over to PlayStation 5 Pro. And as a lot of games now are increasingly cross-platform, and Sony's games live on PCs, you'll probably see much more of that cross-pollination. Clearly a fidelity push for people who may have really big TVs or really big AV lovers and want something that either looks the best it can be or runs really smoothly on the big screens that I played on. You could definitely see the difference, but if you're a PlayStation 5 owner, I think you could also be fine continuing to play the PlayStation 5. They're going to be about 50 games that come out at launch with

upgrades specifically for the PS5 Pro. Now, while a lot of them will involve the introduction of this new PR mode that will be able to run at a smooth 60 frames per second and 4K performance, there are going to be others that do other things. It could be graphic upgrades to the environment, more people in the environment, so that's a console. Let's go play the games. This is uh Sony's Playstation demo room where I got to try out the PlayStation 5 Pro on a bunch of games in two different setups. The first one got to play on two different monitors, checking out a whole bunch of games on the Play 5 and then the PlayStation 5 Pro, uh looking at the two different uh play modes, Fidelity and performance on the five, and then the pro mode on the PlayStation 5 Pro. That's Horizon Forbidden West, and then I got to play a few games on a big 80in screen, including Grant TMO 7, which has an AK mode, or alternately one with raate.

tracing turned on, which is what I've got right here. I mean, this is obviously the version I would want to play. It is the reflections and RT tracing are beautiful. I got really into playing Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, and I love games like this. What's really fun is that it's just such a fast game, and I feel like the pro makes it feel faster. So, I'm grabbing one controller that's connected to a PS5, playing on a PS5 for a bit, and then I would jump back and forth between that and a PS5 Pro to see what it's like. This is the 4K 30 frames per second version of Horizon Forbidden West, which I'm used to and looks really good. But what looks even better is playing it 4K 60 frames per second on PS5 Pro, which looks buttery smooth and really crisp. So, you know, it is like going back and playing it on the other on the 30 frames.

It's kind of hard to do um because this looks really nice. Unfortunately, Sony didn't let us do any direct capture of the PlayStation 5 Pro during our demos at Sony's headquarters, and they didn't let us do any close-up, real extended looks at the gameplay on screen either. But hopefully, you can get an understanding of what I'm talking about for when the system debut is on November 7th. What does this mean for the future of next-gen gaming? Well, that's hard to tell because we're not maybe fully in next-gen gaming yet, but we're getting there by increments. PlayStation 5 Pro is the hottest of the new gaming technology, Tech that we've seen, and it's adopting some ideas that PC gaming still doesn't have yet. It'll be really interesting to see where games start to evolve and get better along with PS5 Pro graphics, but also where the PS5 Pro ray tracing and all that Tech begins to hint at where technology is going to be headed for PC gaming to come. Not everyone's going to

want to upgrade to this, but I'm really curious about what games are going to start looking like on the hardware. We'll find out in November. Thanks for watching.

My Exclusive PlayStation 5 Pro Demo: What $699 Gets You, And Why It Matters

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