Why the PS5 Pro is $700

INTRO 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 of inevitable just like our sponsor Ridge their massive Hennessy sweep Stakes is now live and you can win a Hennessy Velociraptor a goldplated 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 you COULD buy instead 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 What is the PS5 Pro? 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 A not so technical “technical” presentation 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 Why we are disappointed 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 Why it’s SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS 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 with this message from our sponsor course hair maybe you're a fashion Pioneer pushing the boundaries of style with your socks and sandals and that's awesome but even if you're not Corsair makes it easy to bring style to your gaming setup with Corsair custom lab you can create a setup that's as unique as you are start with something like their K65 plus wireless keyboard then find a set of key caps that screams you from there why not add a mouse and a mouse pad to tie everything together corser handles all the heavy lifting just make your Custom Creation they will build it and ship it right to your doorstep we're going to have a link in the video description where you can learn more if 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