Sony PlayStation has finally loosened its grip on the PS5 Pro embargo, meaning that many videos unboxing the staggeringly expensive R19,500 console have hit the internet without reprimand. Digital Foundry has also obliged. This isn’t just about catching a first, proper glimpse of the still-hideous console, but about confirming those specs Sony was a bit hesitant to reveal in the build-up to its release.
Real Pros read the manual
As expected, the unboxing didn’t deliver many surprises. It still rocks up in the same white box Sony has used for years including HDMI and USB-C cables, and a single DualSense controller. Digital Foundry said it expected a “far larger piece of kit,” before being pleasantly surprised by the amount of heft cut away from the original console. Thank goodness for that.
But the real meat of the unboxing turned out to be tucked away in the PS5 Pro manual, revealing the real specs of the console Sony hadn’t deemed worthy to put online. For instance, we now know it’s powered by an AMD Ryzen Zen 2 (8-core/16 threads) CPU while an RDNA-based graphics engine outputs 16.7 TFLOPS of GPU performance, smashing that of the original PS5’s 10.23 TFLOPS figure.
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Power consumption has also been upped over the other models, now drawing up to 390W to keep the console chugging, even if it won’t draw quite that much during play. The 16GB of GDDR6 RAM was also a surprise, as was the additional 2GB DDR5 system memory meant to handle non-gaming tasks – like streaming.
Sony, in addition to this news, finally dropped a comprehensive list of the games that will benefit from a ‘PS5 Pro enhancement’, of which there are 55 total. That seems like the sort of information that players might have liked before Sony began charging for the thing, but here we are. The games that stood out to us as worthy of the boost are No Man’s Sky, God of War, and Demon’s Souls. Whether it’s worth the R19,500 price tag…
