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PlayStation 5 Pro (Quick Look) - A More Optimised PlayStation 5 Gaming Experience

It's not a next-gen console, but does the PS5 Pro prove itself a worthy mid-gen successor?

Audio transcription

"Hello, and welcome to a special Gamereactor Quick Look, because this is the quick look that will go up at the review embargo time for the PlayStation 5 Pro.
Because this was late, we basically missed the unboxing embargo, but I would also argue that that inbox embargo would probably be a little bit boring, because the packaging is very similar, you get the regular DualSense, you get the same kind of pamphlets."

"The actual specification list was revealed through that booklet that you get in the box, because Sony wasn't really being forthcoming with the actual specifications, but we'll tell you all about that here.
The point is that it's really true when Hideaki Nishino, one of the PlayStation CEOs, says that this is not to be considered a PlayStation 6."

"This is an in-between thing where some small differences, pretty big differences in some cases will allow for just a little more optimized PlayStation 5 gaming experience.
So what is new?
Well, the look maintains a lot of the design profiling of the original PlayStation 5 and the PlayStation 5 Slim, but adds just basically one central new visual addition, and that is this right here."

"Now, does it serve any like real functional thing?
I don't know.
We'll probably tear down videos revealing whether or not these are actually, whether there is perforation in between these little ribbons here, but it obviously creates the sense that it needs that extra cooling space because this is a more powerful console."

"Whether or not the PS5 OG design is pretty or not, it has been debated for a couple of years now.
I don't personally like it, but I know for a fact that dbrand is not going to make dark plates for this, but I can't wait to basically just black it out a little bit so we can remove the two color thing that I think should have been avoided in the first place."

"Putting on some black plates here, which we're waiting for Sony to launch, is going to be very nice indeed, but it's not, well, it stays within the same design profiling is my point.
Inside is where you get all of the new stuff that constitutes the PS5 Pro.
But first and foremost, let's just go over what the point of it is."

"The point is to provide an in-between console upgrade for the most diehard fans that want a slightly better gaming experience in the games that support it, which we expect will be the vast majority of them going forward.
Currently, as we record this, there is just shy of 100 semi-new and upcoming games that will support the PS5 Pro, but the PS4 Pro became kind of ubiquitous at some point where all major AAA publisher launches would support the PS5 Pro and the Xbox One X in some capacity, and we expect the same to be the case here."

"But the reveal itself was a bit confusing, with some examples provided by Mark Cerny, which was less than ideal.
But the general core conceit is to merge the two graphics profilings that we've seen this generation and some of the last generation, which means that you either use performance or quality, or whatever it ends up being called."

"Basically you choose frame rate, or you choose graphics quality detail resolution.
Now the PS5 Pro's extra GPU power, alongside PlayStation Spectral Super Sampling, which is essentially like an FSR-esque upscaling way of basically just providing you with something that appears to be higher resolution when it really is using this solution to upscale from a lower resolution."

"Point being, you should be able to get better frame rates without sacrificing so much picture quality.
That is, I think, a really honorable pursuit.
Whether or not it pans out is something that we're going to have to basically examine over the next couple of weeks, not even in our full review, because we only have the amount of games that we have, and we're going to have to see how those pan out."

"It's on a game-by-game basis, basically.
So what is inside?
Well, there is an AMD Ryzen Zen 2 8-core 16-thread processor alongside an RDNA graphics engine on that SoC, which produces what appears to be 16.7 teraflops of GPU power."

"That is compared to the 10.23 teraflops provided by the original PS5.
That should make for some graphics uplift, certainly, and that is what PlayStation is hoping to provide over the next weeks, months, maybe even years.
There is more good news, though."

"This has 16GB of GDDR6 memory, which is good, and there's an additional 2GB of slower DDR5 memory, which is basically only for console tasks.
There's also a 2TB NVMe SSD in here, which is also a really, really good thing to see.
The power draw is increased as well, it's now 390W next to 340W."

"That is probably not going to matter all that much, but what we will be able to provide you in a full review very soon is whether or not that will make for more noise during operations.
We won't know for a little while yet, but we'll soon be able to tell you more."

"So there is more power here.
In some cases, maybe even markedly more power.
It depends on how bottlenecked the game's visuals are by the CPU, which is unchanged.
But more GPU raw power can help, PSSR can help."

"There are certainly examples where smoother frame rates have been achieved, and just better image quality.
But it's going to come down to a game-by-game basis.
Some games may provide zero uplift, whereas some may, and then markedly so."

"We are going to examine this very closely, but so far it's interesting to get new hardware from Sony, particularly at a pivotal moment in console history such as this, where sales are falling.
So will this be able to show us a path forward?
We're going to have to see."

"Thank you so much for watching."

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