PlayStation 5 Pro

Placing an indicative, definitive score on the PlayStation 5 Pro has proven to be a rather difficult task. This review will, in all likelihood, act as part of a purchasing decision not just now, but well into the future as we slowly move towards the launch of the next console generation, and whether the console is actually worth its rather high market price will depend on a number of rather peculiar parameters. Perhaps most importantly, it also depends on how broad the support will be and how much developers take advantage of the extra horsepower under the hood.

First and foremost, it's important to note that the PS5 Pro really, as in really leans on the existing design framework that the PS5 already established, and no one expected otherwise. However, it also means that just like the PS4 Pro, you're paying a lot of money for an experience that in many aspects will feel quite identical. When the console launches there is no special welcome specifically for PS5 Pro owners, it even says "Welcome to PlayStation 5", and there are no new wallpapers or other software tells to remind you that you've spent the extra for this platform.

It's a shame that Sony couldn't find little differentiations here and there to please their most passionate, invested fans, and there's also no real indication inside the games that you're playing on a Pro. For example, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, whose Performance Mode is actually one of the more compelling cases for PS5 Pro among the third parties, it's just that this graphics setting looks better, but neither the game's interface nor a Sony-specific overlay tells you that the reason it looks better is because you have a PS5 Pro - this is also a missed opportunity, I think.

Fortunately, there is better news under the hood. Mark Cerny and Sony seem to have lost the unveiling of the console itself, with examples from games from way too long ago where the examples given were upgrades over the PS5 version of the same game, but where the concept behind the console's identity still made sense to most people. In a world where we are often forced to choose between 60fps and a solid level of graphical detail, it feels obvious to strengthen the level of detail you can get served with the higher frame-rate, even if many developers have decided to just improve Ray-Tracing and seemingly focus on 30fps Quality Mode.

There is more horsepower to take care of this task. It may be the same AMD Ryzen Zen 2 chip with 8 cores and 16 threads, but the RDNA GPU has 67% more compute units and the console RAM is 28% faster. Teraflops is certainly an imprecise metric for calculating actual performance, but these specifications mean that the GPU produces the equivalent of 16.7 teraflops instead of 10.23 teraflops in the regular PS5. Does it make a real difference? We'll get to that. You get the same 16GB of GDDR6 RAM and the same custom SSD, but there's now an additional 2GB of DDR5 RAM to handle console-related interface tasks exclusively, and you get 2TB instead of 825GB. This also means the console now draws 390 watts instead of 340.

The other big news here is PlayStation Spectral Super Sampling, or PSSR. AI-based upscaling is certainly nothing new, and in different guises, Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR manage to do something similar, but with different results and approaches. The idea is the same; the game renders the image at a lower resolution, and then PSSR increases that resolution through AI image processing without losing the higher frame-rate. Sony's various studios have commented on the implementation of PSSR since its unveiling in September, and most seem to agree (but could they be otherwise?) that PSSR introduces a pretty significant difference in their games, with Insomniac for example saying that there is a much higher level of detail by rendering the game at a lower resolution and letting PSSR take the image to 4K. Naughty Dog has also said that vegetation in particular appears more believable after PSSR implementation.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? An upscaler you don't notice that lets you play at a higher frame-rate without negatively impacting resolution or detail. But, as I stated at the start, it's quite difficult to say in the long run whether this will enhance the games you're specifically looking forward to, or whether the differences are significant enough to justify a purchase. We can look at individual test titles that support PS5 Pro (because it will require specific, manual implementation going forward in each and every game) and try to get a little closer. Incidentally, in terms of how widely PS5 Pro implementation will be picked up, I don't think it will be a problem. PS4 Pro was pretty successful with broad adoption among third parties, and there's no reason to think otherwise about PS5 Pro.

In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, we see the simplest but also quite convincing first example of the implementation of PSSR in the game's Performance Mode, which gives a pretty solid boost to the whole experience. The game has always managed to maintain its 60fps, but on Pro the sharpness and detail is a noticeable step up, no doubt about it. This is not a state-of-the-art Ray-Tracing implementation, but for regular gamers who just want a combination of Performance Mode and Quality Mode without sacrifices either way, Veilguard offers a compelling selling point that most will recognise.

But as I said, this is very much game-to-game. Guerrilla Games is apparently using a new rendering method in the PS5 Pro version of Horizon Forbidden West that is neither checkerboarding as we know it from PS4 Pro or PSSR, but using the extra GPU-based horsepower to put together a custom image, and the difference is also extremely impressive. No, we weren't given a tour by Guerrilla Games like IGN or Digital Foundry, and in a way we just had to run around the game world and observe as granularly as possible, but there is a clear difference here - not in frame-rate, but in the level of detail that goes with it.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth and The Crew: Motorfest take a more aggressive approach, combining graphics settings from PS5 into just one "Pro Mode" on PS5 Pro, and the difference is night and day. I personally have the most experience with Rebirth, where I completed the game in Performance Mode, where the game's frame-rate held up reasonably well, but where you were forced to accept a kind of blur of muddy graphic detail that looked like it had been smeared with olive oil as the last step in the game's graphical pipeline. On the PS5 Pro, it really is like playing a different game, and the same can be said for The Crew: Motorfest.

Alan Wake 2 represents a more subtle approach, retaining the same modes (as it is in a number of games) but introducing improved Ray-Tracing performance to Quality Mode and dragging more Quality goodies into Performance. The game looks better, make no mistake about it, but it's more subtle.

I could go on and on, and we have yet to touch on Demon's Souls, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Dragon's Dogma 2 and many others. The truth is that the effect varies, but both I and others here in the office were consistently slightly impressed by how much better many of these games now look while maintaining 60fps. This is where the console really comes into its own, and in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, Demon's Souls, Dragon's Dogma 2, Gran Turismo 7 and a host of others, you currently feel that the console is worth every penny.

But that's just not true for everyone. As the meme video from Jackfrags makes clear, granular graphical detail is a tricky thing, as your eyes quickly become accustomed to what you're playing, and where the difference between 30fps and 60fps is so noticeable that you can never go back (though even this is surprisingly debated), improved Ray-Tracing performance or more detailed shadows or improved clarity of vegetation is much harder to nail down. The truth is that the PS5 Pro, like the PS4 Pro, is designed for those looking for these things, but for them you get a lot for your money.

And then there are the little things; the console is just as quiet as a regular PS5 (we compared it to a relatively new one though - they can get noisy after a while, we know), it barely even gets warm, the controller is still downright sublime and even four years after the launch of the original PS5, we haven't encountered any obvious flaws. But while we praise the little things, there are also little things that jar. Not including the console's Vertical Stand is insulting, and in a "Pro" console it feels wrong not to include the external disc drive in the package. Yes, we are roaring into a digital future, but at the same time, this console is designed for those who want everything, and to partition out the console's accessories and still charge £700 for it just feels wrong.

Sony has really designed a high-end Pro console here, no doubt about it, and across our test suite there are impressive graphical differences. Furthermore, it's not particularly large, produces no noticeable heat or noise, comes with 2TB of space and is, still, a pretty fantastic console all round. It's a shame then that small attempts to push the consumer by omitting something as fundamental as a Vertical Stand should spoil the overall impression here, and Sony really should have introduced small software quirks in the interface that made it clear to a Pro owner that they've spent the extra money. That said, this is a solid upgrade for the kind of consumer who already has an interest in optimised console gaming, no doubt about it.