The Morning After: The $700 PS5 Pro

If it was $600, would we have said it was a steal?

Mat Smith
·Bureau Chief, UK
·2 min read
Sony Interactive Entertainment

Oh, this week isn’t just new Apple product announcements. No. Sony has elbowed its way in to officially introduce the long-awaited PS5 Pro, with more power and seemingly less compromise.

Sony wants to narrow the gap between the fidelity and performance modes players are accustomed to choosing between — either high frame rates or high resolution, and you could switch between the two in most AAA games on the PS5.

To do that, the PS5 Pro’s GPU has 67 percent more compute units and 28 percent faster RAM than the standard PS5. According to the console’s lead architect Mark Cerny, the new console will deliver up to 45 percent faster graphic rendering. Ray-tracing performance could be up to three times as faster — often an optional feature toggle on games as it can also hamper frame rates.

Meanwhile, Sony’s AI-upscaling tech (i.e., its take on the likes of NVIDIA’s DLSS) is called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, which should sharpen up in-game assets without the need to remake them. The new console includes a game boost tool to improve the performance of more than 8,500 backward-compatible PS4 games.

TMA
TMA (Sony)

The PS5 Pro is the same size as the not-small original launch model, but there’s no disc drive model. That’s another paid extra, on top of that $700 price. The good news is it does have a decent 2TB of storage built in.

Interested? Pre-orders start on September 26, and it will arrive on November 7.

— Mat Smith

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Apple needs to remember what the iPhone 16 is for

iPhone 16 hands-on: More Pro than I expected

Why AirPods 4 block sound better — and just sound better

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to introduce legislation that would prevent children under a certain age from using social media. Reuters reported that Albanese issued his statement in a TV interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corp. The Australian government would start by testing age verification technology sometime this year. He also didn’t state a specific age limit but estimated he’d like the ban to be for children younger than 14 to 16 because “we know that social media is causing social harm.”

Continue reading.

TMA
TMA (Engadget)

Huawei’s flagship foldable, the Mate XT, is the first triple-fold phone to hit the market and will debut in China, starting at 19,999 yuan (approximately $2,800). That’s enough to buy an 11-inch iPad Pro, M3 MacBook Air and an iPhone 16. The device folds up accordion-style, with one hinge bending outward and the other inward, leaving one panel available to use as a 6.4-inch exterior display. Unfolded, it creates a 10.2-inch screen, more like the tablets we use. It’s technically impressive but financially prohibitive.

Continue reading.

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