Early PlayStation 5 Pro shipments reveal some big upgrades over the original but that AMD GPU isn't quite what I was expecting
Sony's new PlayStation 5 Pro doesn't officially launch for another two days but lots of lucky buyers have managed to get their hands on one already. A tech YouTuber teardown and the console's manual reveal that the PS5 Pro has a larger internal SSD, extra RAM for the operating system, and a GPU that isn't quite what all the rumours suggested it would be.
The teardown in question was done by Brazilian YouTube channel TAG, which pulled apart a brand new PS5 Pro just so we could all see what's new on the inside. Digital Foundry also got hold of an early shipment but was somewhat less keen on breaking out the screwdrivers, or at least, not just yet.
It turns out that the Pro isn't as big as the initial images suggested it would be. A little taller than the original PS5 and around 500 g (18 ounces) heavier, but nowhere near as bulbous as the first iteration.
The teardown video and manual also confirm the new console gets a larger internal SSD—2 TB in raw capacity, although a chunk of that is «reserved for use in connection with console administration, maintenance and additional options.»
And there's more RAM, too, though not the fast GDDR6 stuff that's used by the processor. There's still just 16 GB of that and while we don't know what it's clocked to, we do know that more of it will be accessible to games because Sony's added 2 GB of DDR5 to the motherboard, to be used by the console's operating system.
The most interesting aspect of the PS5 Pro is the new APU that powers the whole thing. It's another AMD semi-custom APU, with eight Zen 2 CPU cores and 16 threads, plus a 'Radeon RDNA' GPU. It's the latter that's the biggest surprise to me because for a good while now, all of the rumours have pointed to it being an RDNA 3-based chip.
In the PS5 Pro announcement, Sony stated that the new GPU had 67% more compute units than that in the original. The original PS5 graphics processor is RDNA 2-based with 36 compute units and a peak FP32 throughput of 10.3 TFLOPs.
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