PS5 Pro at Two: A $900 Console That Got Smarter With Age
Sony's premium PlayStation launched two years ago at $699. It now costs $899.99, but a 2026 upscaler upgrade built with AMD has quietly made it a better machine than the one people bought.
When Mark Cerny, the PS5's lead architect, presented the PS5 Pro on September 10, 2024, the reaction to the price was louder than the reaction to the hardware. $699.99, with no disc drive and no stand in the box, was a lot for a mid-generation upgrade.
Two years after its November 7, 2024 launch, it costs more: $899.99 in the US since April 2, 2026. But it is also a better console than it was on day one, thanks to a software upgrade in March that changed how its games look. Here is what the Pro is in late 2026, and who it is for.
What is actually inside
The Pro uses the same basic design as the PS5 but with a much bigger graphics processor: 60 compute units, against 36 on the standard and Slim models. Sony says it renders about 45% faster than the original PS5 and handles ray tracing, the technique that simulates how light bounces, about twice as fast.
It also ships with a 2 TB SSD, Wi-Fi 7 and support for 8K output, though very few games use that. And it introduced PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, a machine-learning upscaler. Upscaling means drawing a game at a lower resolution and then using software to rebuild a sharper image, which frees up power for better effects or smoother frame rates.
The 2026 upgrade
The Pro's first version of PSSR gave mixed results, looking excellent in some games and less convincing in others. On February 27, 2026, Sony announced an upgraded version, built on a neural network developed in Project Amethyst, its machine-learning partnership with AMD. On PC, the same collaboration produced AMD's FSR 4 technology.
The first game to use it was Resident Evil Requiem, where Capcom highlighted sharper hair and beard detail. Then system software 13.00, released on March 24, 2026, added a setting called "Enhance PSSR Image Quality", which applies the new upscaler to games that already support PSSR. More than 50 PS5 Pro games had PSSR support at the time.
The price problem
The upgrade is good news. The price is not. The Pro launched at $699.99, rose to $749.99 in August 2025 with the rest of the PS5 family, and jumped $150 to $899.99 on April 2, 2026. Sony blamed "continued pressures in the global economic landscape", and the wider memory shortage has pushed up console prices across the industry. In Korea, the Pro has cost 1,298,000 won since May 1, 2026.
That puts it in an awkward place. A Pro now costs $250 more than a standard PS5 at $649.99, and you still need to buy a disc drive separately if you want to play physical games.
Should you buy one?
The Pro makes the most sense for people who play on a large 4K television and care about image quality, and for players who want the best version of big releases on PlayStation. Grand Theft Auto VI, arriving on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, will be the biggest test of how much extra the Pro delivers, but Rockstar has not detailed Pro-specific features.
WGC's take: the Pro is a better product today than at launch, and the PSSR upgrade shows the value of hardware that can improve through software. But at $899.99 it is hard to recommend over a standard PS5 unless image quality is your main reason for playing. If you already own one, turn on "Enhance PSSR Image Quality" in the settings. If you do not, the gap between the two PS5 models has never been wider.