PlayStation 5 Pro Hands-On First Look: Here's What I Learned
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PlayStation 5 Pro Hands-On First Look: Here's What I Learned
Exclusive: I checked out the new console upgrade, coming Nov. 5 for $700, and played a bunch of games. Here's who might appreciate the new graphics boosts the most.
Surprise: The PS5 Pro isn't actually that big, but it does have a big GPU upgrade.
Sitting in front of an 80-inch TV playing Gran Turismo 7 is an immersive experience. It's even more realistic in 8K resolution. I'm not a good driver, but that's partly because I'm stunned by the clarity of the vistas in front of me. I'm also wowed by a new 4K ray-tracing mode that casts car reflections on other racers. It feels almost like I'm in VR without the headset. But would the average person be able to tell the difference? I kept wondering that both during and in the week after my exclusive demo of the PlayStation 5 Pro.
I went to Sony's PlayStation headquarters in San Mateo, California, and spent time in a room full of TVs, all running demos of familiar games such as Ratchet & Clank and Spider-Man 2. These demos were all playing on the new PlayStation 5 Pro, arriving Nov. 7 for $700 (£700) with preorders starting Sept. 26. Mark Cerny, Sony's lead PlayStation system architect, guided me around the demos, pointing out the Pro upgrades compared to the standard PS5 on a side-by-side monitor.
As I jumped back and forth, I could see the difference. Everything is crisper, more fluid or both. I'd prefer to play on the PS5 Pro. With a non-Pro PS5 available for $500 today and likely less during upcoming holiday sales, I don't know if the sometimes subtle upgrades will be worth the price for many. The PS5 Pro is not the PlayStation 6, which likely won't be released for another three or four years, and it isn't for everyone. It's a big, graphically boosted piece of hardware that can keep up with ever-changing PCs and, in some ways, maybe exceed them.
Compared to the PS5 Slim (left), the PS5 Pro isn't that much bigger.
Similar in size with turbo-style vents
I was shocked that the PS5 Pro wasn't a hulking beast. The console's contours are nearly the same as the original PS5, and it's actually smaller. Meanwhile, the "Slim" PS5, released last year, is definitely smaller than the Pro but the difference in size isn't massive.
The biggest external differences, teased in Sony's 30th-anniversary logo, are the diagonal black ribbed vents across the center. (These mean the Pro is incompatible with existing PS5 console covers.) The front and rear ports on the Pro shipping in November are the same as the current PS5, but the prerelease hardware I saw on display during my demo had an extra USB-C port in the back instead of USB-A. The final hardware will have USB-C ports on the front and USB-A ports in the back. The PS5 Pro should slot into similar shelving to your older PS5, unlike the chunkier PS4 Pro released in 2016, and you can mount the Pro vertically on the optional $30 stand if you prefer.
The Pro comes with the same DualSense controller as the PS5 -- no upgrades there. (A step-up DualSense Edge controller already exists.) The Pro doesn't have an optical disc drive. Instead, there's a larger 2TB solid-state drive, plus the same support for expanded M2 SSDs. You can attach an optical drive separately, the same ones that work on the new PS5 models. You could detach one of those or buy a new one. Not having an included optical drive standard feels like a statement that downloadable games are now the standard, and the Pro's bumped-up Wi-Fi 7 support should make for faster downloads if your router supports it.
Gaming perks: Bigger GPU, 4K and 60fps, lots of ray tracing
Everything the PS5 Pro offers is about graphics. The CPU is the same as the PS5, and so is the SSD speed. The GPU, meanwhile, has 67% more computing cores, according to Sony, with 28% faster RAM and 45% faster rendering.
There are three big initial upgrades Sony is specifically pushing on the Pro for what that new GPU is doing: more ray tracing, automatic AI-assisted game upscaling for 4K and a new Pro mode for games that will combine 60fps and 4K together.
An AI-assisted upscaling mode, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, works across the whole game library but requires games to update via a patch, adding in details to upscale to 4K. It'll also work on PSVR 2 games in the future, Cerny said.
Playing games on the Pro
I hopped around several TV stations in a single room, trying out snippets of PS5 games with early versions of Pro upgrades. Sony didn't allow CNET's video team to directly capture footage from the Pro to show the advantages, perhaps because the game updates might still change before the November release. I got to play PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of six games side by side on two identical 4K TVs, and I also played a couple of games on a much larger 80-inch 8K TV, too.
Many of the games I played, including Horizon: Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, focused specifically on how the new, best-of-both-worlds 4K/60fps Pro mode felt to play. Answer: It feels great. Just running through the grass in The Last of Us or looking out at waterfalls in Horizon was lovely. Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank just felt a lot better to play at smoother, higher frame rates on a big canvas. Many of the upgrades were on the subtle side. Sometimes I had to stop and check side by side to appreciate the difference.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in particular popped compared to the fuzzier graphics on the existing PS5 version. Everything was sharper, and still 60fps smooth. It felt like putting new glasses on.
My demo of F1 24 showed new ray tracing effects during a rainy race, which made the track and environment feel more photorealistic. Rain on the pavement reflected the car and the sky, and glass walls near me showed the stands across the road.
Gran Turismo 7 was maybe the most stunning demo of all, because it added two new modes. 8K gameplay on an 80-inch screen made me wonder how this could be used for sim racing setups with massive displays. Ray tracing, finally added into GT7's gameplay in another 4K mode, made crowded races with cars feel even more real. I was so hypnotized by looking at car finishes that I kept crashing.
Sony also mentionson its PS5 Pro blog postother games getting PS5 Pro launch updates that I didn't play: Alan Wake 2, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Demon's Souls, Dragon's Dogma 2, Hogwarts Legacy, The Crew Motorfest and The First Descendant.
What is next-gen, anyway?
Four years after the PS5 debuted in the middle of a pandemic, time seems to have flown. Right now is actually past the time for when Sony tends to release midcycle console upgrades. The PlayStation 4 Pro arrived three years after the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 5 debuted four years after that. By that math, maybe the PS6 could come four years from now.
Consoles aren't at a "next-gen" point yet, but who knows if they'll ever be. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its subscription library running everywhere, game streaming is continuing to spread, and smaller PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck are reinventing ways to play games, and rediscovering what consoles can be. Sony has opened many of its games onto PC, so there are already a bunch of PlayStation gamers who don't have a PlayStation at all.
PC gaming, which Sony is increasingly involved in -- lots of flagship first-party games coming to Steam, and the PlayStation VR 2 now having its own PC adapter -- is a landscape of perpetual change. There are already plenty of games that can optimize to many GPUs and displays: It's expected. To a PC gaming crowd, a PS5 Pro may or may not seem appealing. For someone who wants to play bleeding-edge games with stepped-up graphics on their own amazing TV, the PS5 Pro looks like exactly the step-up splurge.
I'll admit, I was a little surprised at first that the PS5 Pro demos I saw were all of established PS5 games, with no new and exciting content in sight. That's part of the point of the Pro: It's a performance upgrade to the same platform, not a whole new console. That should be comforting to existing PS5 owners, because a lot of them probably don't need the upgrade.
Yet, 4K 60 fps gaming is so tempting if you have the display for it. In all the demos I tried, I found myself wondering if I'd just want to play everything in this mode and never look back. It was hard to return to 30 fps gaming on some of the PS5's fastest-paced games like Ratchet & Clank or Spider-Man 2.
I know a lot of multiplatform gamers, and I wonder if the expectations for Sony are that their own gamers will increasingly be that way too. "I think multidevice players are growing, but it's not a significant portion from the PlayStation console community point of view at this moment. But I think more customers want to kind of play on multiple devices, so that will grow," Nishino said.
VR and the future of peripherals like Portal
As CNET's resident VR expert, I'm curious what the PS5 Pro can do for the PlayStation VR 2, although Sony's support for the headset has been underwhelming lately. Cerny said the Pro will allow higher-resolution games on the PSVR 2 thanks to the GPU boost and eventually a tuning of Sony's AI upscaling that will work with all VR games. No specific PSVR 2 upgraded games have been announced yet, and I wonder what those improvements would even feel like. (I mentioned to Cerny and Nishino that I'd still love to see original PSVR games like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, which are incompatible with PSVR 2, to get ports that still haven't happened yet. I didn't get a response to that comment.)
I also wonder about other peripherals to come. The PlayStation Portal, released last fall, enables remote PS5 gaming in a handheld form, but it's dependent on Wi-Fi speeds, which can affect performance. Would a PS5 Pro improve future wireless handheld accessories? According to Sony, over 60% of Portal owners are new to remote play, despite existing streaming solutions for remote play being available before on phone and tablet apps. A Portal successor might be in Sony's future, perhaps one with Wi-Fi 7.
Confirmed PS5 Pro updated games
Although this list is sure to grow, here are the games Sony has confirmed so far:
Alan Wake 2
Assassin's Creed: Shadows
Demon's Souls
Dragon's Dogma 2
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
Gran Turismo 7
Hogwarts Legacy
Horizon Forbidden West
Marvel's Spider-Man 2
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
The Crew Motorfest
The First Descendant
The Last of Us Part I
The Last of Us Part II Remastered
Until Dawn
PS5 Pro specs
Upgraded GPU with support for advanced ray tracing and AI-driven upscaling
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