Keep on seeing on how they will market it but this thing will sell itself as long as it is reasonably priced. Keeping it in stock will be bigger challenge if they underestimated demand. If the PS5 Pro Digital edition is very close in price to disc version of standard PS5, can see a lot of people preferring to choose 2024 technology over 2020 level technology. Hopefully they do a bundle with discounted disc drive if they don't offer a disc drive version. It will be great if they can bring back the Grey for a special 30th Anniversary edition model and/or covers.
Considering Sony get the storage much cheaper than consumers, it would be good if they offer higher capacity storage options. Probably one of the reasons why the standard PS5 is so similar in BOM to Series S while being technically more capable than Series X. Other reasons might be Microsoft looked like they went with a more expensive process node to make potentially older RDNA compute units more competitive with RDNA 2 features added and Zen 2 cores more efficient but looks like that approach has not allowed to transition to 6nm easily like Sony managed and they didn't have SmartShift too so having potentially lower TDP, less cache bandwidth made their console more bottlenecked with their large or small, narrow and slow GPU design over the wide and fast medium sized GPU approach Sony took with PS5 and AMD did for RDNA 2. They had saving grace that more work appears to go into optimising games for their platform though and they have almost monopoly on standards used in PC. Even PS5 Pro might be $100 lower BOM than Series X so a strong place for Sony to be in the here and now. Microsoft next-generation might only have NPU upscaling and similar generation GPU for their next-generation consoles but without the large hardware subsidies that have made Microsoft be able to sell in reasonable quantities with Xbox One and Series consoles. It would have been likely very bleak if they tried selling at same margins Sony and Nintendo sell their consoles at so hopefully next time around, they make it more cost effective consoles that don't require billions of dollars of subsidies to sell.
This console feels like the biggest step up as a mid-generation console bringing almost like a generational leap in GPU technology. It also brings about the biggest increase in compute for a mid-generation console too. It is going to be the most technologically advanced GPU AMD has produced, much like when PS5 launched being the first RDNA 2 GPU. Upscaling tech looks like it will exclusive so even AMD's 2025 RDNA 4 GPUs will be considered less impressive and desirable up against new generation Intel and Nvidia products which have dedicated hardware upscaling technology. It may offer better performance per watt than any consumer Nvidia GPU currently on the market if the GPU part is on TSMC N4P, naturally RDNA GPUs get more competitive on that front when they reach 60 compute units too and get even more power efficient if you limit maximum power. It could even have better upscaling technology than latest DLSS, we shall see as Nvidia DLSS is designed originally for much weaker hardware than the PS5 Pro so it would be great if they can pull that off but Nvidia probably have more people working on it.
If Sony can't market best value, efficient, most powerful console in the world at a slight premium, they need to get new people in their marketing team. It looks to be stronger than the Titan RTX at a fraction of the price. It will be like Apple won't be able to market an iPhone 16 over a hypothetical $100 discounted iPhone 12 due to being similar in design, number of cameras and screen resolution in 2024. I think the bigger issue they will have is keeping the demand for standard PS5 up at current levels. This could be huge in US with Xbox demand going down for about a couple of years until their next-generation consoles are out and no competitor in terms of low cost Slim console or high-end console unlike last generation. They obviously will remain strong in other markets.
The Standard PS5 SKU could suffer more from Switch successor than something like a PS5 Pro so PS5 Pro moving forward could be biggest revenue generator and best selling console if they have enough stock until the Switch successor comes out. If they can't cost reduce the standard PS5 further like they did for standard PS4, that SKU will likely be more in trouble than a PS5 Pro so can see PS5 Pro getting more of a market share than PS4 Pro managed. It might be until around 2028 before PS6 so it is important for Sony to keep PlayStation relevant until then than be complacent and give up market share by resting on their laurels by not offering a more competitive product in the here and now. I think they really need to make a handheld by then too. I see people calling it a niche product but seems strange thing to call what is likely going to be one of the best selling consumer electronics and potentially most in demand? Obviously price point will be critical, if it is something like £800 for the base version, then I find that will be unlikely to be selling well but if it is close to PS5 Disc version in price, it is going to sell an incredible amount.
Personally did not find reason to upgrade to PS4 Pro as compelling as the PS5 Pro is. This is looking to be much more of a meaningful bump to get more out of my existing 4K screen (No need to buy a new screen to get advantage of this like last time so smaller price barrier for entry). Only upgraded to PS4 Pro with final revision mainly for the 1080p recording capabilities. Last generation CPU was much weaker comparatively than GPU, this time it seems more the other way around so good to see we are getting a GPU more suiting to the level of CPU the consoles launched with. Hopefully PS5 Pro has AV1 gameplay recording so standard 1080p recording looks much better quality. Will be interesting to see if the increase in memory bandwidth and efficiency will make for a sizeable improvement for CPU performance. Concerned they might introduce latency if they had to keep the CPU part on an older node and it is no longer monolithic. Will be interesting to see what audio improvements are made to new games over the standard console, if it will be minor or more substantial with the extra bandwidth available. Will be interesting to see if there will be big speedups with the new shaders too in certain titles that utilise this and are updated to take advantage of it. RT acceleration seems an impressive increase and consoles are better at RT with same level parts than PC due to the APIs so hopefully developers patch older games to bring them more in line to existing PC versions. It is good they allowed PSSR to be used on older SDK's so they can increase developers patching out bad upscaling techniques out of the existing titles as if they had waited for PS6 for that, might have been too late for developers to bother.
A lot of PC gamers make it sound like everyone has an RTX 4090 (Best selling GPU is a 4060 at the moment which the standard PS5 can compete with) as standard but even that is a small step up over a PS5 Pro to most consumers. Say for example new COD game runs at PSSR 4K 120FPS on PS5 Pro, people with only 120Hz displays will probably get a bit shinier graphics and even if they had 240Hz display, a 4090 would struggle to lock that with CPUs currently out. Another example might be say a game is 4K60 on PS5 but 4K90 on RTX 4080 with same settings or 4K60 with a bit higher detail. Hardly anything to write home about given disadvantages like stutters, power draw, potential fire hazard, shader compilation times over something that boots instantly like PS5 and runs cool and quiet while being significantly lower in cost. Will Nvidia flex $4000 4090 laptops that sound like a jet in comparison as a competitor and show games that are CPU (The part they don't make) demanding as a big performance advantage in especially low resolution high frame-rate gaming which is main advantage PC has at the moment? Makes PS5 Pro a much easier sell given the value proposition it offers compared to what else is on the market currently. What product offers better value and performance than PS5 Pro?
