Sony has finally pulled back the curtain on the new PS5 Pro. The upgraded console is priced at $700 and will be available on November 7th, with pre-orders launching on September 26th. And much like the PS5 Slim Version, you’ll need to pay extra if you want a disc drive or a vertical stand.

The PS5 Pro brings some major improvements over the original PS5, which originally dropped in 2020. Sony’s goal is to close the gap between fidelity and performance modes that gamers have gotten used to toggling between. The new console is made to provide better graphics at more stable frame rates across all games.

The new GPU comes with 67% more compute units and 28% faster RAM than the base PS5. Ray tracing performance is expected to be up to three times faster too. Sony’s take on AI upscaling, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), is also being introduced, which should help with smoother visuals across the board.

Sony’s first-party studios have already started optimizing their games to take advantage of the Pro’s enhanced power. Games like The Last of Us Part 2 and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 are on the list of games expected to look even better or run at more consistent frame rates. Third-party developers are jumping on board, too, with patches planned for games like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and Final Fantasy 7. These games will be marked with a “PS5 Pro Enhanced” label to show they’ve been fine-tuned for the new console.

Another cool feature of the PS5 Pro is a game boost tool that could enhance the performance of more than 8,500 backward-compatible PS4 games. It might even give a boost to PS5 games that aren’t officially optimized for the Pro.

Despite all these upgrades, Sony managed to keep the PS5 Pro roughly the same size as the original console. It has the same height as the OG PS5, but is as slim as the disc-free version. You’ll get a DualSense controller and 2TB of storage right out of the box, which is a bump up from the earlier models’ 1TB.

Sony has already sold 61.7 million PS5 units as of June 2024. With the Pro joining the original and Slim versions, it seems Sony is on track to maintain its lead in this generation’s console wars.

Now, the $700 price tag will be a hard sell for some – it definitely is for me – but at least Sony is delivering a substantial upgrade this time around so we’ll have to wait and see how it fares.