PlayStation 5 Pro review: the best console you can buy, at a price that keeps getting worse

The PlayStation 5 Pro launched worldwide on 7 November 2024 at $699.99 as a digital-only machine. Sony raised US pricing to $749.99 on 21 August 2025, citing a 'challenging economic environment', then raised it again to $899.99 effective 2 April 2026, this time pointing at memory and component cost inflation. That is a $200 increase — 28.6% — in roughly seventeen months, and it happened without any hardware revision.

The same April 2026 adjustment moved the standard PS5 to $649.99 and the PS5 Digital to $599.99, so the Pro premium over a disc-equipped base console is now $250. Add the detachable Ultra HD Blu-ray drive at $79.99 and the vertical stand, and a fully equipped Pro lands close to $1,000 before accessories.

This matters more than it usually would, because almost every published review of this console was written when it cost $699.99. Outlets that landed on 7/10 at launch are, in 2026, broadly steering readers toward a base PS5 or a PC. We have scored the machine as it is sold today, not as it was sold in 2024.

Sony has been unusually cagey with the specification sheet. Officially you get '16.7 TFLOPS' and '67% more compute units'. Digital Foundry's die analysis fills the rest in: 60 compute units across 30 workgroup processors, clocked at roughly 2.17 GHz, on a custom architecture that is broadly RDNA 2/3 with an RDNA 4-derived ray tracing block bolted on. Both TFLOPS figures you see quoted — 16.7 and 33.5 — are correct; they simply use different FP32 conventions, with the larger number counting RDNA 3 dual-issue.

Memory is where the quieter but very real win sits. The Pro keeps 16 GB of GDDR6 for games but runs it at 18 Gbps on a 256-bit bus for 576 GB/s, up 28% from the base console's 448 GB/s. Sony also added a separate 2 GB of DDR5 dedicated to the operating system and background tasks, which frees roughly another gigabyte of the fast pool for games. In practice developers have around 13.7 GB to work with.

The CPU is unchanged: eight Zen 2 cores at a variable 3.5 GHz. There is a new 'High CPU Frequency Mode' that pushes to 3.85 GHz — about 10% — in exchange for a ~1.5% GPU clock reduction, which is a sensible trade in simulation-heavy titles but not a fix. If a game was CPU-bound on a PS5, it is CPU-bound on a Pro.

PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution is the first machine-learning upscaler to run on dedicated console silicon, and it is the single feature that justifies the Pro badge. It costs roughly 2 ms of frame time to take a 1080p image to 4K, and occupies about 250 MB of memory. In exchange, developers can drop the internal resolution far enough to enable ray tracing and still hand the television a clean 4K60 image.

Alan Wake 2 is the cleanest demonstration. On a base PS5 the performance mode renders at roughly 847p and reconstructs with FSR at 30 fps. On the Pro it renders at 864p and reconstructs with PSSR at 60 fps — a similar internal resolution, twice the frame rate, and a noticeably more stable image. Silent Hill f goes from a 360–720p dynamic range reconstructed to 1800p, to roughly 720p reconstructed to a full 4K.

It was not flawless at launch. Reviewers and players documented shimmering on fine geometry, disocclusion trails behind moving characters, and in a handful of titles — Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Silent Hill f were the most-cited — an image that some people preferred on the base console. The PSSR 2.0 firmware Sony shipped during 2026 addressed the large majority of these cases. A few edge cases remain, and they are worth knowing about before you spend $900.

Across the titles we ran, the pattern is consistent: where a base PS5 offered a 30 fps fidelity mode and a 60 fps performance mode, the Pro offers a single mode that looks like the former and runs like the latter. Spider-Man 2 hits 60 fps in 'Performance Pro' with ray tracing enabled. Horizon Forbidden West delivers fidelity-tier image quality at 40 fps on a 120 Hz panel. Elden Ring, which was never a showcase for either console, gains about 30%.

The efficiency story is the part that surprised us. In Digital Foundry's measurements, Elden Ring draws 214.1 W on a Pro against 216.2 W on a PS5 Slim — 30% more frames for slightly less power. Spider-Man 2 is 232 W against 218.2 W, and F1 24 sits around 235 W. There is no thermal drama here: our unit stayed quieter than a launch PS5 in every session, and the fan only becomes audible in the heaviest ray-traced scenes.

Backwards compatibility is better than we expected. 'PS5 Pro Game Boost' applies uncapped frame rates and higher-resolution modes to a large catalogue of unpatched PS4 and PS5 titles. It is not universal, and a few older games behave oddly, but the list of titles that visibly benefit without a developer patch is long.

The Pro is taller and thinner than a launch PS5 at 388 × 89 × 216 mm and about 3.1 kg. The centre band is matte and the outer panels are removable, which matters because the disc drive bay lives under one of them. There is no vertical stand in the box, which for a console this shape is a genuine irritation rather than a nitpick.

Connectivity is the most modern of any console: HDMI 2.1 with 4K120, 8K and VRR, gigabit Ethernet, two rear 10 Gbps USB-A ports, a front 10 Gbps USB-C and a second Hi-Speed USB-C, plus a Gen 4 M.2 slot. It is also the first console with Wi-Fi 7 in supported markets, and Bluetooth 5.1 for headsets and pads.

Storage is 2 TB, of which roughly 1.86 TB is usable. Given that Call of Duty and Final Fantasy installs routinely exceed 100 GB, this alone removes a real annoyance from the base console — and if it is not enough, the M.2 slot takes a standard Gen 4 drive with a heatsink.

In August 2026 the console market has repriced across the board. Microsoft raised 1 TB Series X pricing to $799.99 on 1 August and discontinued the 2 TB model; Nintendo's Switch 2 hike is scheduled for around 1 September. That compression means the Pro is no longer an outlier by as much as it was, but it is still the most expensive box on the shelf by $100.

Against a base PS5 the technical case is unambiguous and the financial case is not. Against a PC, $900 buys a machine with a current-generation mid-range GPU that will also do DLSS or FSR 4 upscaling, run a much larger library, and be upgradable — at the cost of the plug-and-play simplicity that is the entire point of a console.