You don’t need me to tell you that the new PS5 Pro, on sale November 7, is the most powerful PlayStation ever made. The real question: Could it be worth $700, the most Sony has ever paid for a gaming console?
I think I can answer that, but first, I want you to find a measuring tape.
Find your favorite seat in front of the TV, then measure the distance between your head and the screen. Now measure your screen diagonally. Do you have a 65-inch TV or 55-inch TV, the more popular sizes? Are you sitting 10 feet or more apart? So no, the PS5 Pro probably isn’t worth $700. Not even if you have 20/20 vision like me. The improved optical resolution is not noticeable enough at that distance.
But if you sit close to it, Sony’s new gaming console can make some games look amazing. Blades of grass, pillars of rough-hewn stone, the fabric of a backpack – they are shown in higher resolution. It’s enough of an improvement that I found myself wanting to sit closer, stand, or even connect my PS5 Pro to a 4K computer monitor to use it as a gaming PC.
With some games, playing the original PS5 may feel like looking through a dirty window. The PS5 Pro has the ability to wipe that window clean.
Sony PlayStation 5 Pro
$699
The Good It’s a PS5, but with mid-range PC graphics quality Less difficult choices between resolution and frame rate Slight improvements to the sharpness of PS4 games too Smaller, lighter and quieter than the original PS5 The Bad $699 The drive costs more No Ensures that your favorite games will see improvements How We Rate and Review Products
I think it’s important to make this clear right away: the PS5 Pro doesn’t make every game “professional.” To really see the difference, it requires specially patched “PS5 Pro Enhanced” games – although the ever-reliable Digital Foundry has seen that it can speed up some regular games too.
This is not a PS6. Sony has made no suggestion that it will launch a new generation of consoles or have any exclusive games. It still runs the same PS5 and PS4 titles using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU cores, gets the same software updates, uses the same excellent DualSense gamepad, and offers largely the same ports.
If you choose games that already run beautifully on PS5, like the excellent Astro Bot, the only differences you get may be physical ones, like the three curved, sword-shaped fins that divide the upper and lower halves of the console, or how sleek and sleek the controller is. Quiet, or how surprisingly light you feel. The PS5 Pro weighs three pounds less than the original 2020 model, even after adding the optional disc drive. The controller is a little smaller too.
Size comparison: Original PS5, PS5 Pro, PS5 Pro with disc drive.
But the PS5 Pro comes with an additional 2GB of DDR5 memory, more than double the 2TB of storage, and most importantly – a 62 percent faster GPU, with 16.7 teraflops of raw graphics compute. Add in the AI upscaling technology called PlayStation Spectral Supersolution (PSSR), and it’s easily the most powerful home console yet.
Some additional notes for PS5 Pro reviewers:
You get two front-facing USB-C ports, but one of them is the slow USB 2.0 type. The easy-to-upgrade NVMe SSD expansion slot is still present. The PS5 Pro has Wi-Fi 7, though I wasn’t able to test that. (I tried Wi-Fi 6 and Ethernet.) Remote Play isn’t necessarily improved, but it looks better thanks to better resolution in the PS5 Pro’s performance modes. It runs cool enough that I failed to use it as a foot warmer yesterday. Many PS5 Pro optimized games have targeted frame rates, rather than fixing them, and claim to run slightly faster on variable refresh rate (VRR) displays. The PS5 Pro can run non-optimized games faster too if it has unlocked frame rates. See Digital Foundry for more. Some PS5 Pro Enhanced games have 120Hz modes, likely with lower response time – I haven’t tested this effectively yet. Aside from ray tracing, the Pro appears slightly weaker than the 5800X/3060 Ti gaming PC in early tests; I can play Alan Wake II there with better textures and more detail.
What that actually means for games is up to each studio to some extent. But in practice, many developers boast that you no longer need to choose between smoothness and fidelity; You can have your cake and eat it too with 4K-like graphics at 60fps.
At Sony’s PS5 Pro preview event, I told you how that wasn’t entirely accurate: With only a 45 percent increase in display performance, some graphical compromises are still being made. But after spending several days in a row switching back and forth between the original 2020 PS5 and the new PS5 Pro, and testing more than a dozen games in all their different graphical modes, I think there’s something in the “best of both worlds” claim.
In every game I tried — while sitting no more than eight feet from a 65-inch TV — the PS5 Pro was clearly the better place to play.
In The Last of Us, I could see individual blades of grass instead of a sea of green. In Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, I could see the peach fuzz on Aloy’s cheeks. In Demon’s Souls, Spider-Man 2, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and The Last of Us Part II, the enhanced fragility and smoothness of the entire image helped bring cities to life, bringing castle walls, skyscrapers, floating ships and post-war to life. The apocalyptic frozen wastelands look more realistic. Everything is more…specific.
Even PS4 games can get a bit sharper on the PS5 Pro: I played Bloodborne, Gravity Rush 2, and my current kid-favorite Lego Dimensions, and each got slight improvements once I toggled the new PS4 image enhancement option in the console’s settings menu.
The problem is that my couch is not eight feet from the TV. That’s 12 feet, which is too far to tell the difference between the PS5 and PS5 Pro, because those details fade away. I can barely notice the difference from 10 feet away, sitting on the edge of my seat.
The big exception I’ve tried is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. While I can’t see all of the visual improvements while lying on the couch, Rebirth definitely takes home the award for most improved on the PS5 Pro, no longer forcing me to choose between distractingly choppy or annoyingly blurry. A new, PS5 Pro-exclusive “Versatile” mode delivers a sharper image than previous muddy options, and the difference is visible from a distance; I can see some uber Final Fantasy fans picking up the console for this reason alone, especially lapsed fans who haven’t bought a PS5 yet and just need to justify the extra $270 for the Pro.
However, most games don’t have much room for improvement.
Click here for full size image. From left to right: PS5 “Performance-Sharp” mode, PS5 “Graphics” mode, and PS5 Pro “Versatile” mode.
And you shouldn’t expect the PS5 Pro to necessarily improve graphics in the ways you might prefer. The open world of FFVII Rebirth still does that pop-up thing where plants and bushes appear just as you’re about to bump into them, and Alan Wake II still can’t stop Detective Casey’s sideburns and facial hair from popping in and out of existence.
Speaking of Alan Wake II, it’s also one of the few PS5 Pro enhanced titles to offer a new optional ray tracing mode. They’re just ray-traced reflections, a far cry from the full ray-tracing the game can offer on today’s gaming PCs. However, it’s amazing to see how realistic Oh Deer Diner’s windows are when you can see the whole world reflected in them, and see them realistically at the same time – the PS5 Pro handles that well. The game runs much slower, targeting 30fps instead of 60fps, but it doesn’t underperform so much that it becomes unplayable.
Image Slider: Swipe left to remove Alan Wake II beam-traced reflections from the window and pond. Larger images here and here.
Ray tracing in Alan Wake II (and F1 24) is an interesting taste of what the PS5 Pro might be capable of in the future – if the console sells well enough for developers to seriously target it with their new games. The PS4 Pro finally got a long list of improved games, but it launched at just $400 with an optical drive, generous trade-in offers at GameStop, and a sharper offer to move your games from 1080p to 4K. The adoption rate was high. Sony recently revealed that 20 percent of PS4 customers ended up purchasing a PS4 Pro as well.
$700 will be a tough pill for some potential buyers to swallow, especially considering it doesn’t come with an optical drive. Personally, most of my PS5 and PS4 library is on discs, and I had to special order the $80 optical drive (which is a bit rare now!) to play some of my games. Sony has provided review codes for others.
Adding the optional $80 drive is very easy – no screws required, just remove the panel.
You should know that reviewers did not have access to all 55 PS5 Pro enhanced patches that Sony promised on launch day. As I write these words, major titles that could use improvements and promised improvements, like Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the just-released Star Wars Jedi Survivor, have yet to release their patches. It’s possible that some games I haven’t tested will seem better (or worse) than those I’ve been able to experience. But at this point, I feel like I’ve seen the range from “good” to “excellent.” And like the PS4 Pro, there’s real potential here if developers take advantage of it.
Ever since Sony announced the PS5 Pro and revealed its $700 price and lack of an optical drive, I’ve heard all kinds of people making fun of the company. Some suggest that you need a magnifying glass to see the difference in vision quality. (Don’t do that). Some suggest that you’d be better off building a gaming PC. (Maybe, but maybe not for $700).
For that matter, I played the first part of The Last of Us on today’s mid-range gaming PC, a PC whose graphics card still retails for around $300. I sat at the loading screen for 15 minutes just to compile the game’s shaders, then launched a game with buggy hair and dull gray mirrors that didn’t reflect. I fiddled with the settings for an additional 20 minutes to make the game playable.
Then I connected my PS5 Pro to the same 4K display. The game loaded almost instantly. It was beautiful and instantly playable.
The type of person who should buy a PS5 Pro is the type of person who doesn’t want to mess around. They’ll want the best console gaming experience money can buy, a big OLED screen to go with it, and a plan to position themselves close to that screen.
Update, November 6: Added links to Digital Foundry discussing how the PS5 Pro’s Game Boost can also speed up frame rates in some regular PS5 games, and a note about Wi-Fi 7.
