PS5 Pro review: how close is your TV?

You don’t need me to tell you that the new PS5 Pro, which goes on sale on November 7th, is the most powerful PlayStation ever made. The real question: could it possibly be worth $700, the most Sony has ever charged for a gaming console?

I think I can answer that – but first you need to find a tape measure.

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 own a 65-inch or 55-inch TV, the most popular sizes? Are you sitting 10 feet away or more? So no, the PS5 Pro probably isn’t worth $700. Not even if you have 20/20 vision like me. The improved visual fidelity just isn’t tangible enough at that distance.

But if you sit closer, Sony’s new games console can make selected games look amazing. Blades of grass, columns of rough-hewn stone, the weave of a backpack – they spring at higher fidelity. That’s enough of an improvement that I found myself wishes to sit closer, stand or even connect the PS5 Pro to a 4K computer monitor to use it as a gaming PC.

With some games, playing the original PS5 could feel like looking through a dirty window. PS5 Pro has the power to wipe the window clean.

I think it’s important to make this clear right away: PS5 Pro doesn’t make every game “Pro.” To really see a difference requires the specially patched “PS5 Pro Enhanced” game – however the ever-reliable Digital Foundry has seen it can also speed up some normal games.

This is no PS6. Sony has not suggested that it will start a new generation of consoles or have any exclusive games. It still plays the same PS5 and PS4 titles with the same AMD Zen 2 CPU cores, gets the same software updates, uses the same excellent DualSense gamepad, and offers pretty much the same ports.

If you choose games that already run beautifully on PS5, you may like it excellently Astro Botthe only differences you get may be physical, like the three curved spiral fins that divide the console’s upper and lower halves, or how cool and quiet it runs, or how surprisingly light it feels. The PS5 Pro weighs three pounds less than the original 2020 model, even after you add the optional disc drive. The console is also slightly smaller.

But the PS5 Pro comes with an extra 2GB of DDR5 memory, more than double the storage space at 2TB and – most importantly – a 62 percent faster GPU with 16.7 teraflops of raw graphics processing. Add in an AI upscaling technique called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) and it’s easily the most potent home console yet made.

What this actually means for games is up to each studio to some extent. But in practice, many developers boast that you no longer have to choose between smoothness and fidelity; you can have your cake and eat it too with 4K-like graphics at 60 frames per second.

At Sony’s PS5 Pro preview event, I told you how it wasn’t strictly accurate: with just 45 percent more rendering performance, some graphical compromises are still being made. But after spending days on end swapping back and forth between my original 2020 PS5 and the new PS5 Pro, and testing over a dozen games in all their various graphical modes, I think there’s something to that claim about “the best of both worlds”.

In every title I tried — while sitting no more than eight feet away from a 65-inch TV — the PS5 Pro was clearly the better place to play.

IN The last of usI could see individual blades of grass instead of a sea of ​​green. IN Horizon Zero Dawn remasteredI could see the peach flake on Aloy’s cheeks. IN Demon’s souls and Spider Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and The Last of Us Part IIthe improved crispness and smoothness of the entire image helped bring cities to life, making their castle walls and skyscrapers and floating ships and post-apocalyptic frozen wastelands feel more real. Everything is just more… defined.

Even PS4 games can be a bit sharper on PS5 Pro: I booted up Blood borne, Gravity Rush 2and my current childhood favourite Lego Dimensionsand each had slight improvements when I toggled a new PS4 image enhancement option in the console’s settings menu.

The thing is, my couch isn’t it eight feet from my TV. That’s 12 feet, too far to see a difference between the PS5 and PS5 Pro because those details melt away. I can barely tell the difference at 10 feet while sitting on the edge of my seat.

The big exception I’ve tried is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. While I can’t see all its visual improvements recline on the couch, Rebirth definitely takes the award for Most Improved on PS5 Pro, no longer forcing me to choose between distracting stuttering or annoying blur. Its new PS5 Pro-exclusive “Versatility” mode provides such a clearer picture than the previous muddy options that the difference is visible from a distance; I could see some Final Fantasy uber fans who pick up the console for that reason alone, especially lapsed fans who have yet to buy a PS5 and only need to justify an extra $270 for the Pro.

However, most games don’t have that much room for improvement.

And don’t expect the PS5 Pro to necessarily improve graphics in the ways you might prefer. FFVII Rebirth‘s open world still does that pop-in thing where plants and bushes appear just as you’re about to run into them, and Alan Wake II still can’t keep Detective Casey’s sideburns and facial hair from strobing in and out of existence.

Speaking of Alan Wake IIit’s also one of the few PS5 Pro Enhanced titles to offer an optional new ray-tracing mode. It’s just ray-traced reflectionsa far cry from the full-fat ray tracing that the game can offer on today’s cutting-edge gaming PCs. Still, it’s amazing how realistic Oh Deer Diner’s windows look when you can see the whole world reflected in them and realistically see through them at the same time – the PS5 Pro handles it well. The game runs much slower and targets 30fps instead of 60fps, but it’s not so much of a performance hit that it becomes unplayable.

The beam tracks in Alan Wake II (and F1 24) is an exciting 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. PS4 Pro eventually got a long list of improved gamesbut it launched for just $400 with an optical drive, generous trade-in offers at GameStop, and a clearer value proposition to take your games from 1080p to 4K. Adoption was high; Sony recently revealed that 20 percent of PS4 customers ended up buying a PS4 Pro as well.

$700 will be a tough pill to swallow for some potential buyers, especially considering it doesn’t come with an optical drive. Personally, most of my PS5 and PS4 library is on disc, and I had to special order the $80 optical drive (they’re a bit scarce right now!) to get some of my games to run. Sony provided review codes to others.

You should know that reviewers did not have access to all 55 PS5 Pro Enhanced patches that Sony promises for launch day. As I write these words, great titles that could use improvements and have promised improvements like the one just released Dragon Age: The Veil Guard and Star Wars Jedi Survivorhave not yet released their patches. It’s possible that some of the games I haven’t tested look better (or worse) than the ones I was able to try. But at this point I feel like I’ve seen the spectrum from “good” to “meh”. 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 both the $700 price tag and lack of optical drive, I’ve heard all kinds of people ridicule the company. Some suggest you need a magnifying glass to see the difference in visual quality. (You don’t.) Some suggest you’d be better off building a gaming PC. (You can, but probably not for $700.)

For that matter, I lit up The Last of Us Part I on my mid-range gaming PC today, a PC whose graphics card alone would still sell for around $300. I sat on a loading screen for 15 minutes just to compile the game’s shaders, then launched a game with buggy hair and dull gray mirrors that don’t reflect. I fiddled with settings for another 20 minutes to make the game playable.

Then I connected a PS5 Pro to the same 4K display. The game loaded almost instantly. It was both beautiful and immediately playable.

The kind of person who should buy a PS5 Pro is the kind of person who doesn’t want to mess around. They want the best console gaming experience money can buy, a big OLED screen to go with it and a plan to park themselves really close to that screen.

Update, November 6: Added links for Digital Foundry for discussion of how the PS5 Pro’s Game Boost can also speed up framerates in some normal PS5 games, and a note about Wi-Fi 7.