Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro launch is imminent, scheduled to arrive in four days (November 7) priced at $1,699 USD.

At this price, Sony is promising substantially improved resolution and frame rate through the use of AI upscaling with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) technology, as well as an improved CPU and GPU compared to the base PlayStation 5 launched in November 2020.

Given the lack of a similar refresh of Microsoft's Xbox brand, it seems the high-end console gaming throne has been ceded to Sony, and an apparent teardown of the new, more powerful console appeared on YouTube just last night.

The PlayStation 5 Pro teardown video ahead of its release date appears to come from a console repair shop in Portugal, and the process reveals an internal design that's fairly similar to that of the PlayStation 5 Slim. Other sources They've pointed out that these similarities would make the PlayStation 5 Slim cases compatible with the Pro, if the interconnection mechanisms hadn't apparently been specifically modified to prevent that functionality, so this teardown also seems legitimate.

Aside from a few noted similarities to the PS5 Pro, there's not much else to immediately note about this PlayStation 5 teardown unless you really want to see the internals. You can't evaluate the performance of these internals based on a teardown alone, as you'll only be looking at circuit boards rather than numbers that might set some expectations. For those, we'll be keeping an eye on a Twitter post that's also been getting a lot of press attention this week.

This alleged PlayStation 5 Pro specs leak was posted yesterday afternoon on Twitter by user @videotechuk_, who is previously known for posting Rockstar Games leaks. This leak mostly includes information we already knew or expected, including that the PlayStation 5 Pro will still use the same Zen 2 architecture as its immediate predecessor, the PlayStation 5. Sticking with Zen 2 is likely a conscious choice to ensure strict compatibility with the base PlayStation 5, though some previous reports have mentioned that the PS5 Pro could potentially support boosted clocks compared to the base.

What’s most notable about this alleged spec leak is that the PS5 Pro’s GPU is now expected to operate at 16.7 teraflops and have a total of 16GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM, without having to share it with the CPU like the base PlayStation 5 models do. The PlayStation 5 Pro is also rumored to have 2GB of dedicated DDR5 RAM for the system. This marks a clear departure from previous PS5 models that had unified memory.

Four years on from the PlayStation 5’s original November 2020 release date, it’s clear that gamers are more eager than ever to pick up the new PlayStation Pro console, despite this being Sony’s second mid-generation “Pro” upgrade. If Xbox isn’t going to cut it and you’re not willing to get into PC gaming, the PlayStation 5 Pro still makes sense, and early evidence of its PSSR image quality improvements and support for real-time ray-traced graphics looks promising.