Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “PS5 Pro: the sad truth!”.
Three years into the PS4, we got a brand new Pro version of the console, and now that we’re approaching three years of the PS5, it seems natural to assume it’s PS5. Pro time right I mean you, look at what we’ve got from the technical perspective.. You’Ve got two generations newer of AMD CPUs. You’re, going from Zen 2 to Zen, 4 or maybe even Zen.
5.. You’Ve got yourself a brand new graphics architecture in RDNA, 3 and you’ve got the ever-wonderful chip improvements that will allow us to get more power, lower voltage. All that kind of stuff.
Look, it’s essentially the perfect time to completely overhaul PS5.. The idea of a PS5 Pro is interesting because if you look at this point in the PS4’s lifecycle, the PS4 Pro is about to come out, but with the PS5 I think it’s gon na be a little bit of a different case.. First and foremost, the PS4 and the Xbox One were not good consoles.; No, no look.
They were not terrible right and obviously they provided lots of fun for lots of gamers for seven eight years.. However, they were pale shadows of what they could have been. But forgive me for a little bit of going back in time here.
The PS4 Pro also almost immediately was necessary because the PS4 was launched right at the dawn of the 4K TV era.. People had gotten over 3D they’d gotten over curved pretty much, and everyone wanted to go 4K and guess what That shiny, new PS4, that they had just released that had to make it six seven eight years down the pipeline as far as being the generational lead. Guess what That didn’t really handle? 4K.
I mean technically, it worked in like 4K photo mode or something, but you couldn’t game in 4K, which meant that both Sony and Microsoft had a huge incentive to bring out a mid-generation refresh with the Xbox One X and the PS4 Pro.. Only three years in Sony basically redesigned the entire PS4.. Now, yes, the PS4 Pro had significantly better graphics, but it wasn’t really a major upgrade other than that and yeah.
You could play some games at 4K, mostly with some checkerboarding and 30P and upscaling. Like it was an upgrade for sure, but it was not ideal and I think it’s important for us as we consider the idea of a PS5 Pro this generation to think about. Why Sony would do it. Pretty much all games that we’re playing today are absolutely being hamstrung by PS4 and Xbox? One compatibility.
You got ta support the hundreds of millions of consoles that are already out in the wild, at least for a little while longer, which means that we’ve not even come close to seeing the full potential of what the PS5 can do, which is a far Cry from when the PS4 came out, which pretty much immediately developers were able to get on top of, because guess what It was about as powerful as a low-end gaming PC. Like it was not anything special. Like we’ve talked about on This, Is where the next PS5 Or next PS6 really might not even come out until 2027 or later. This hardware is gon na be with us for a very long time. Seven years, eight years 10 years. We’re gon na be using PS5s and Xbox Series Xs as the baseline for game development. Really for the next decade.! So if you think about that and try to find the weaknesses on how that’s gon na hold back gaming in the way that the Xbox, 360 and PS3 had a tiny amount of memory. And it dragged on for so long and held back games or you think about how the PS4 and the Xbox One had slow hard drives and weak CPUs. What you don’t really see are those same kind of bottlenecks for the PS5.. Now, yes, having better ray tracing support would be great and yeah.
Of course, I always want more CPU and GPU and RAM and all those kind of things, but the most important thing is the consoles that we have today have all the modern features. The bells and whistles that you would expect, which means that when you do move on to your RTX 6090 gaming PC in 2026 or whatever, that computer is gon na, still have all the capabilities of these consoles. But it’s going to be amplified.. You’Re gon na have better ray tracing and all this kind of stuff.
The most important thing is that these features exist at all on the existing consoles, which I think is a really important part of why I honestly think the PS5, as it is right now, might Be the most well-rounded console we’ve had since, like the PS2 generation. In the past consoles and really most technology, but especially consoles, have followed a pretty strict path. It launches, let’s say at $ 500 or $ 400 or whatever the very very first version ships at and Then maybe a year, two years later, you see a little price cut. Then, after that, you see a slim model which maybe even sees another price cut and by the end of the lifecycle, you’re getting a PS3 or PS4 for 200 or 300 bucks right.
That’S great and that’s the way it’s pretty much always been. Consoles have always gotten cheaper and slightly better and maybe sometimes a little bit worse, but cheaper, cheaper, cheaper throughout the lifecycle., If you’re a gamer who doesn’t want to go shell out 500 bucks for a PS5 On day, one just hang out for a little while., I’m sure it’ll be 200 bucks at GameStop right Nope. I don’t think that’s gon na happen.. The way that these consoles have gotten cheaper in the past has been.
They have been simplified, shrunken and the costs have kind of been sort of watered down over tens of millions of console units being sold.. First of all, yes, there’s probably gon na be a PS5 Slim right. I don’t think that’s gon na be a surprise.. In fact, if you look at the existing PS5, the 2022 model, which you can purchase right now, the 1200 model that actually already has seen some improvements from the technical and from the packaging perspective..
If you crack, one open you’ll, see that not only does it have a six nanometer processor, as opposed to the seven nanometer that was in the launch PS5, the actual motherboard itself is smaller, meaning that, if Sony wanted to, they could sell you a PS5 Slim with That board in it right now.. They don’t really need to do that and I feel, like it’s probably a little too early for them to actually hop to a full slim model. But that’s a thing.. However, unlike what we’ve seen in the past, as things get simplified and smaller Sony didn’t drop the price of the PS5., No, they raised the price of the PS5 pretty much everywhere around the world, except in the US.. That’S pretty much entirely because the US dollar is so strong that it kind of overweighed the inflation and importantly, the build and material costs for something like a PlayStation 5. Look chips are not getting cheaper, especially when you look at cutting-edge silicon, like the SoC at the Heart of the PS5.: Now, yes, they will be able to shrink it down..
You know, there’ll be new process nodes which will come with either added performance or realistically. What they’re gon na take advantage of is smaller chips, which means that they can fit more of those chips on each wafer and save a little bit of money that way., What’s not gon na, be the case, unlike previous generations, is that these are going to mean It is a cheaper console., If anything, maybe that PS5 Slim goes back to the original launch price or knocks a little bit off, but we’re not gon na see, in my opinion, super cheap consoles, like we have in the past. When you’ve got the entire world clamoring Over CPUs GPUs mobile chip sets all using those same wafers as they get more and more technically advanced. They just get more expensive and it’s just not quite the way that things have been in the past, which means that for Sony, not only are you not going to want to cut the price of your PS5 much, but on top of that, where would that possibly Leave room for a PS5 Pro Just think about that for a second right, Why would Sony make a PS5 Pro? Why would they add all of the extra complication for the developers? Why would they have the extra confusion when it comes to? Oh, I want the PS5 or the Slim or the Pro. What do they do? I don’t know they all do the same. Thing.
Like last time. Oh this is the 4K one. You wan na play 4K yeah get the Pro, but this time it’s like. Oh, what are you gon na really get out of a PS5 Pro 8K? I don’t think so. I mean technically if they wanted to, but look no one is buying 8K TVs.. That’S just not a thing.
As a consumer. There’S not a clear and easy value proposition on why you would ever need the PS5 Pro.. Now us, as enthusiasts, would surely probably be interested, even if it was $ 800. I mean yeah.
I want more performance blah-blah-blah the same way I wan na upgrade my PC every year.. It might not radically do something different, but it’s gon na play games faster, smoother, better resolution, blah blah blah blah blah. But consoles are not like that, and I don’t see how Sony could possibly be incentivized to spend the money on the R .