The PS5 Pro is official. After months of leaks, Sony just announced a more powerful PS5 console during a special tech presentation. Mark Cerny, the PS5 console’s lead architect, says the PS5 Pro improves on the original console in three key ways: a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and custom AI-powered upscaling.

The PS5 Pro launches on November 7 for $699.99 and looks similar to the slim version of the PS5 – just as recent leaks suggested. It has three stripes on the side and doesn’t come with a disc drive. You’ll be able to buy a 4K Blu-ray disc drive separately, as well as optional console cases.

The hardware upgrades inside will result in 45 percent faster rendering, according to Cerny, and should improve detail in certain games and frame rates. One of the big pushes for the PS5 Pro is to not make PS5 Pro players choose between performance modes and fidelity modes. “Players are choosing performance about three-quarters of the time,” Cerny said.

Sony has upgraded the GPU in the PS5 Pro with 67 percent more compute units than the current PS5 console, and it also has 28 percent faster memory. All of this contributes to 45 percent faster game rendering.

This extra power should improve ray-traced games, with Sony suggesting that developers will be able to “emit the beams at double, and sometimes triple, the speed of the current PS5 console.”

The PS5 Pro also includes Sony’s new AI-powered PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) feature, which is essentially an upscaling technique similar to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR to improve frame rates and image quality for PlayStation games. This custom PSSR upscaling is designed to replace a game’s existing temporal anti-aliasing or upsampling implementation.

Sony is also adding a PS5 Pro “Game Boost” option that will apply to over 8,500 backwards-compatible PS4 games for the PS5 Pro. “This feature can stabilize or improve the performance of supported PS4 and PS5 games,” said Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s platform business group. “Enhanced image quality for PS4 games is also available to increase the resolution of select PS4 games.”

The PS5 Pro also supports Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, VRR, and 8K resolutions. Games will need to be patched to take advantage of some of the PS5 Pro’s features, and Sony says developers are preparing free software updates for existing titles that will be labeled as PS5 Pro Enhanced games.

The first PS5 Pro Enhanced games will include Alan Awake 2, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Demon Souls, Dragon Dogma 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Gran Turismo 7, Hogwarts Legacy, Horizon Forbidden West, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Breakup, The Crew Motorfest, The first descendantAnd The Last of Us Part II remastered.

The PS5 Pro will also be compatible with the PlayStation VR2 headset, the PlayStation Portal handheld, and existing PS5 controllers. Sony says it isn’t changing the UI or network services for the PS5 Pro, so they will be identical to the existing console.

Pre-orders for the PS5 Pro begin on September 26, ahead of its launch in stores on November 7.