after some very unpopular moves lately Sony has finally dropped a welcome
surprise on their fans the eagerly awaited PS5 Pro and 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
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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 tldr 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 cuz number two is too two to
three times better raid 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 retraced
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 onew 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 hourong 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 midli 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 Cal 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 aame 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 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 making sure they get their paychecks
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you guys enjoyed this video and you especially like to see us take on Sony
head-on check out the PS5 killer video where we build a PC for the price of an
original PS5 boy that would have sure been easier to do with an extra 200
bucks hey