Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Good info, freeing up more memory for RT was a big concern so they've addressed that in some fashion.
It's a 'middling' upgrade in terms of raw hardware yeah, but I somewhat disagree with Alex's befuddlement of how they will market this due to this mediocre specs uplift. I get for the majority of existing PS5 owners who are more casual gamers it's not that enticing, but the refresh models have always been about extending the tail of a consoles lifespan for new buyers. Every product's worth eventually comes down to the price, and there's little confusion in the PC GPU space when you see a product with a marginal uplift in price but a more significant uplift in performance.
Like the 7700XT at launch was largely dismissed as 'pointless' because for only $50 more, you could get the 7800XT and get what...15-20% better performance? If someone was looking at a 7700XT, you would just assume they didn't know about the next tier model, as it makes little sense as a purchase from a value perspective.
So I think a $100 premium for the Pro is likely going to be the upper-tier expectation of the added MSRP. For that, you're getting a base ~50% rendering uplift, higher in RT, and perhaps significant improved image quality. From the perspective of a new buyer, relative to what you get with performance uplifts for gaming technology in the PC space, it's a pretty significant gen on gen upgrade. It's definitely weaker compared to the refreshes from the past gen, but this is expected - we've been told continuously how we can't expect those large uplifts due to the cost of new nodes, if a 50% uplift is unacceptable then Ada/RDNA3 are absolute disasters using that rationale (and some would agree).
