As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases
Credit to Sony INC
It’s been one month since I got the PS5 PRO. From that point even until now the system has been received poorly. Many cry about the price tag and others about the lack of supported games. As someone who bought and played the (paid link) Pro, what kind of experience has it been so far?
Appearance
Coming from a launch model PS5, the Pro physically is an noticeable improvement. It is slightly thinner and a bit smaller than a launch model. Other than that it isn’t much of an improvement outside of horizontal placement. It may not look like it, but it’s way more stable then the launch PS5. The cheaply made feet placed in the system actually make the system sit firm. The system is not extremely resilient, but it doesn’t feel like your console is going to nose dive off your desk like with the original stand.
Credit to oldschool gaming
The only other notable external aspect I have come to like with the PRO is the flaps. It’s way easier to get access to the external M.2 SSD slot. The OG PS5 always felt like I was going to gorilla the panels off. However I don’t have much good to say about the PRO system. The biggest problem with this system is it feels like it was made to rip you off. You realize this when you look at what it’s lacking.
Borderline Required Accessories
Unless your library is all digital and you want to use the PRO horizontally it’s a mandatory $120 additional cost to get this system to a useful state. The new stand is definitely stable, but a major downgrade in convenience. The OG PS5 stand wasn’t winning any awards for quality, but didn’t cost an additional $30 and could be used vertically as well.
The bigger downgrade is the disc drive attachment. The reason is due to pure greed. If you didn’t know, Sony owns the 4K disc format that the PS5 has. Also, they have made using a disc drive on a PS5 Pro a potential disaster for future use. The disc drive has a day 1 required DRM in order to be used by the system. It also doesn’t allow you to swap drives without the registration process happening again. This means you can’t swap the disc drive easily if it breaks. It also means that if you’re offline, you won’t be able to undergo the registration process. For collectors, this means this system has an expiration date for their physical library without modification.
If anything can be good said about the disc drive is that the eject button is now on the disc drive and not the console. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally shut off the system instead of ejecting a game.
Internals
I won’t go into specifics since it’s not really something that can be put into perspective to most people. The raw numbers aren’t something that makes sense besides “higher number better”
The short version is the PS5 PRO is more powerful than the launch PS5, but not enough to be considered a generational leap. It currently only uses its additional horsepower in a minimal way. The reason is due to how the devs are using the horsepower. We will go into more of this in the games section. The only real increase you’ll notice right away from this hardware is the memory increase from 800 gigs to 2TB. It’s literally twice as much space. So far I’ve found even with the PS5 Pro patched games, I still have way more usable space for games.
Game Improvements?
Credit: Vex
For the most part it’s really hard to see a significant difference on my tv. I admit I don’t have the most advanced television or setup to view all of its capabilities like VRR and 120fps 4K gaming. However a setup that can take full advantage is about 4-5 years away from being in a reasonable price range for most people’s setups. Someone who has a higher end setup could get a bit more out of it. In general games look about the same on the PRO. I can see a slight upgrade over the PS5, but nothing I could point immediately towards without having to put a side by side for comparison.
As for performance, games that play well on the PS5 stay smooth on the Pro. The unpatched Pro games boost the performance consistently across the board. However this only happens with games that rely more on the GPU and not CPU. (Aka games like Wu Kong will play better, while games like Cyberpunk will not have any improvement) That’s not to say there are no games that showcase an upgrade. The main leap is by far with games that were released in the last year or two. As some of you know, game consoles are limited to the hardware they are on. In order for one aspect to be enhanced another aspect has to be turned down. A balance of quality versus feel.
A lot of games from Dead Space to now are compromising more on image quality or performance to play a game. Many games will render the game at a high texture quality, but with a lower resolution output like 720p and upscaled to 4K to have the game run. This is nothing new and has been done since video games were first made. However we are seeing this more and more now due to how long console gens are lasting. What used to be a nonissue or an issue exclusive to last gen is becoming the norm. Console upgrading used to be every 4-6 years. We have been the last 2 decades on consoles lasting 7+ now.
What the PRO does is push the performance through and helps games that are GPU dependent to be more stable. Some games with poor handling of visual quality like (paid link) Final Fantasy VII Rebirth are a night and day difference visually with the PS5 Pro patched enabled.
Credit: Digital Foundry
Before it was a major compromise to play the game with performance mode active. Now it looks great on performance and even better on quality. The only games that aren’t not seeing an upgrade like Cyberpunk because they are CPU bottlenecked. They will only receive a minimal improvement since that cpu chip wasn’t really improved at all. Some sources say it’s at best a 10% increase so you’re talking 1-3 frames better.
The last part of the PS5 Pro is the AI upscaling that Sony has been marketing. AI upscaling aka PSSR, which many have called the pisser. What it essentially does is use AI upscaling to make a game seem more sharp then it actually is. Kind of like a sharpening filter but way more complex. With the PS5 games it’s not that big of an improvement since many have such high image quality that the AI improvement is minimal at best. Right now there is a major issue with PSSR because it’s not operating right. Outside of Sony’s first party teams it’s not providing the upscaling that it promised.
Credit: Vex
Games like (paid link) Silent Hill and Jedi Survivor are actually downgrading the image quality of the games. This seems to be an unintended bug, but is concerning. You are paying potentially over $850 for a worse experience than the base PS5. Sony is hoping devs will figure out the AI to help improve games over providing hardware needed to meet the need.
Sony needs to implement a fix for this by allowing an option for turning off “AI enhancement” and allowing the Pro’s boost mode to improve the base game modes. This is likely a more difficult way of handling the problem, but they can’t be selling a product that isn’t working as intended.
Credit: Mystic
The bonus feature of PSSR is that it works on PS4 games too. It has to be enabled in the PRO’s settings. Most of the improvements, you can see are mostly in the menus that are not made in 4K, but for the gameplay itself it’s minimal improvement at best.
Why Own a PS5 Pro?
“It’s got Pro on the box”
At this point the PS5 Pro’s success is based on the hope for Sony to live up to its promises. The Pro isn’t a replacement for the PS5 and it isn’t intended to be the next gen console. It is unreasonable to hold it to that standard. It’s a system for those who have the equipment to utilize it or have the funds to flex it.
Personally I believe the Pro is the sign of a change in technology. Until hardware can catch up, we will see a Psuedo approach to how games work. Currently the best example is Stellar Blade.
It uses the television’s display technology along with the console’s power to make a game look good and run smoothly without fully relying on the console alone. At one time it was a system on a chip approach where one thing does it all. Now we are going back to dedicated hardware that relies on each other to make experience work.
Lastly I think that PSVR2 games could benefit extremely from this extra power since they take a dip in the visuals to run the game at a consistent fps. There are only 3 titles right now that support it. The only thing left to do is to convince Sony to support it. However If Sony drops it like a dirty t-shirt then we got ourselves an $800 paperweight.
Thank you for checking out this blog! Special thanks to Andrew for allowing me to post this blog on his website. Please be sure to follow up on all things gaming here on Insane Nerdy Culture. Downs47 going dark. Remember now to Stay Frosty!
Your friendly neighborhood nerd with a passion for games, anime and New York Yankees
Leave a Reply