The launch of the PS5 caused considerable controversy as it had very limited availability, allowing speculators and retailers to exhaust all the supplies that were coming to the market limit its availability and be able to raise prices. I remember that during that Christmas, in 2020, some people paid more than 1000 euros to get the said console.

Even in reputable stores, the price of the PS5 nearly doubled, a situation that created a huge anomaly that eventually affected the price of the console as inventory began to return to normal. This abnormality was so important that even two years after its launch Sony he could afford to raise the price of his console by 50 eurossomething that hasn’t happened in any generation, at least as far as I can remember.

PS5 it seemed unstoppable with excellent sales and profitability, but eventually time passes and no console is immune to its effects. PS5 sales remained generally high, but there was an evident gradual decline during 2023, which was evident in inventory levels, and led Sony to take action to accelerate the model’s unit purge. channel.

These measures focus on two main keys, reduce the selling price console a offer game packages current with interesting value for consumers. As a result, we can buy the PS5 in the version with an optical drive from only 429 euros, an action that is exclusive to Black Friday and which is already active at major retailers such as PcComponentes, which has opened a huge campaign to celebrate Black Friday.

Reduce the selling price of the console from 549.99 euros to 429 euros This has a significant impact on its profitability., but it’s a necessary step to clear the accumulated PS5 inventory and make room for the Slim model, which, as we told you back then, will be released gradually and its availability will depend on the situation of the original model . Where there is a lot of stock left of the current models, the launch of the PS5 Slim will be delayed to avoid making stock clearing more difficult.

PS5 and the next generation that wasn’t what they sold us

Don’t get me wrong, it’s clear that just by using the Zen 2 CPU, even if it’s a stripped-down version and worse than the PC version, and by integrating a powerful SSD drive into the PS5, we’ve already faced an important generational leap. The problem is that it was generated on said console too much expectation which generated an unreal image of her and which is still maintained today by the classic mythologizing of the brand’s fans.

This anticipation has led some to believe that the PS5 is the equivalent of a current high-end PC, that it has a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti-level GPU, and that it will even be able to play games at 8K resolution. Obviously it inflated a huge bubble in which some media participated, but its failure was inevitable and the dose of reality that the users of the said console have been receiving in recent months is evident.

At MuyComputer we have always maintained a realistic and reliable view of reality PS5, because we’re all about offering you the truth, not generating “clickbait” headlines that only end up causing more misinformation. Therefore, when we learned about the final specifications of the PS5, we made it clear that it is not the equivalent of a high-end PC, and we saw its main limitations in many articles.

One of the most interesting articles along these lines was the one where we discovered that even 1080p resolution is starting to outgrow the PS5. It’s no longer that this console isn’t a system designed for 4K, which was evident when checking the specs of its GPU, an AMD solution with 2,304 shaders that shares a deck and TBP with the CPU and that lacks infinite cache, but rather that Full resolution HD is too much for it when we are having fun next generation games.

In the end, this is something completely normal, because the PS5 is still a console with an APU, where the CPU and GPU are integrated, and both components have very important cuts. This console’s CPU is much less powerful than the Ryzen 5 3600, and it actually is between Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 5 2600. Its GPU is also much less powerful than the Radeon RX 6700 and would actually stay closer to AMD’s Radeon RX 6600.

Why did the PS5 drop so much and so quickly in terms of performance

When the PS5 hit the market the stage of the generational transition has been enormously extended. This meant that most of the games were based on the technical base of the PS4 and Xbox One, and therefore these titles had much lower demands, making Sony’s new console “surplus” due to its greater power.

It’s very easy to understand, and it’s actually a reality that has had a positive impact on the PC world, as it’s made many relatively old configurations possible. experience a second life because in the end it wasn’t next-gen games that arrived, but rather cross-generational titles where the minimum requirements barely changed.

This is why the PS5 hardware showed more capacity, because the technical basis of games was a generation behind. However, in demanding games that offered advanced options such as ray tracing, it was already possible to see that this console was not able to live up to the false expectations it created. For example, consider Dying Light 2 with ray tracing limited to shadows and ambient occlusion running at 1080p and 30 FPS on PS5, and it’s a title that runs smoothly on PS4.

The transition to next-gen games has already begun, and as a result, the PS5 has begun to show its seams. Unreal Engine 5-based games like Lords of the Fallen and Remnant II have made it clear that the PS5’s hardware is exhausted, so much so that it’s no longer enough to use low quality, but it’s also necessary render at 720p and upscale to a higher resolution to maintain 60 FPS in high-demand games.

We have another recent example in Alan Wake 2, one of the most challenging and advanced games today, as I told you in this technical analysis. The PS5 version of the game uses two modes, quality mode and performance mode. Both are based on different graphics quality settings, as performance mode uses low and medium quality settings, while quality mode combines high, medium, and low quality settings.

In quality mode, the game renders at 1270p and upscales to 2160p while maintaining 30 FPS. Performance mode renders at 847p and upsamples to 1440p and runs at 60 FPS. Its base resolution is less than 900p, meaning it doesn’t even reach 1080p, and you can tell by the quality of the image, which seems blurred and clearly indistinct. This mode also reduces vegetation density and other important graphics settings. Ray tracing is out of the equation in this game which is already too big for the PS5.

Things will only get worse in the coming years and the launch of the PS5 Pro will be inevitable

We are faced with a curious situation that frankly reminds me a lot of what happened with the PS4 in the previous generation and the subsequent arrival of the PS4 Pro as an intergenerational refresh. Seeing the problems the PS5 is having when switching to Unreal Engine 5 and other advanced graphics engines like Remedy’s Northlight makes it clear to me that The arrival of the PS5 Pro will be inevitableand that it could debut in late 2024 or early 2025 at the latest.

Consider that we are very close to reaching the point where intergenerational development ceases to exist, meaning that all games will be based on advanced and more demanding graphics engines, and that Unreal Engine 5 will become the standard, as it happened at the time with Unreal Engine 4. Seeing the problems the PS5 has in moving games based on said graphics engine, I think the story speaks for itself.

With this panorama, Sony will have no choice but to launch an intergenerational renewal prevent the most demanding users from switching to a PC, and this is where the PS5 Pro comes in, a console that will follow the same approach as the PS4 Pro and will therefore be a minor renovation of the original model. We still don’t have the official details and won’t until at least next year, but using intuition and common sense I can give you a number of very solid basics of what we’ll most likely see in PS5 Pro specs:

1. It will repeat the use of the Zen 2 CPU with 8 cores and 16 threads, albeit at a higher operating frequency. This avoids complications for developers and simplifies compatibility between the PS5 Pro and the current model. Increasing the frequencies will allow for a slight performance improvement that could contribute to more stable frames per second when starting at 1080p and below.
2. It will retain the configuration of 16GB of unified GDDR6 memorybut it will likely come with some additional secondary memory between 2 GB and 4 GB DDR5, which the system and core applications will use. This frees up more of the unified GDDR6 memory for developers to use for higher quality textures.
3. It will not introduce changes to the performance level of the SSD, although its capacity may increase and may arrive in a 2 TB version, of course at the cost of a higher price. This version can also be optional and can be supplemented with a cheaper version configured with 1 TB.
4. GPU will be the most important change, and in this case it is possible that the PS5 Pro uses a more advanced architecture. I would bet on GPU based RDNA 3 and configured with a maximum of 3,840 shaders, which would leave us with a significant performance difference. The transition to the RDNA 3 architecture will also lead to improved performance when working with ray tracing.

On the performance level, the PS5 Pro will get along better with Unreal Engine 5 and also with ray tracing, but always keep in mind that we are still talking about an APU-based system, so we can’t expect any miracles. If the PS5 just moves really comfortably 720p or 1080p resolution with Unreal Engine 5, it is very likely that its older sister, the Pro model, set to 1440presolution from which a better result is achieved when resizing to 2160p.

The PS5 Pro will coexist with the PS5 Slim, as was the case with the previous generation at the time. The first will be a “premium” model with higher performance and a higher price, and the second will be positioned as a cheaper model that will gradually become obsolete with the normal evolution of PC components.

Of course, Sony will adjust the price of both consoles so that both have their space in the market. It’s very likely that the Pro model will eventually hit the market with an approximate price between 500 and 600 eurosand that the Slim model is being discontinued about 400 euros in the version including optical drive.

Before I finish, I want to make one thing clear, and that is this Despite all these shortcomings, the PS5 still offers interesting value for money., especially now that we can buy it on sale for 429 euros. We can’t build an excellent PC with new components for this money, so it is possible to consider if our only goal is to play and not “care” about the hardware problem.