Following its announcement earlier this month, we’ve had a chance to go hands-on with the PlayStation 5 Pro at a Sony event in San Francisco. With a rapid nine-minute reveal and little additional information made available after the fact, this is our first look at the new hardware, PSSR upscaling and 11 upgraded PS5 Pro titles in the flesh. Going in, the questions were simple: is the premium $699/£699 price point commanded by the PS5 Pro justified? Does the pro console deliver a genuine upgrade in terms of frame-rates, image quality and visual features?
That’s a complicated calculus for sure, but getting to actually sit down and play these PS5 Pro games has made the argument better than the reveal trailer and spec sheet has. In my mind, this is akin to a big graphics card upgrade for a gaming PC – you can suddenly enable new features that you couldn’t before, and you also enjoy a general uptick in performance that makes your existing games more fun to play. This goes double if you primarily played your PS5 games in performance mode when given the option, as you’re keeping the same 60fps update rate in most cases but image quality takes a gigantic step forward – and you may get some new ray tracing features in the bargain.
Before we get into the fundamentals of the value argument, it makes sense to cover the games that we had a chance to play at the three-hour press event. There were some games that felt a bit by-the-numbers in terms of upgrades, but there were also surprising and genuinely exciting demos that best sold the idea of the PS5 Pro.
The first game is not one you might expect: F1 24. Codemasters are continually pushing visual features on the PC version, despite the yearly release cadence, and there is therefore a lot of rendering technology that can be used for the PS5 Pro. The headline here is that the PS5 Pro has enough grunt to deliver a 4K 60Hz quality mode with multiple RT effects – DDGI (dynamic diffuse global illumination, previously seen in the PS5 version), plus RTAO, RT transparency and RT opaque reflections. In the right circumstances, this is an almost generational leap in image quality.