Hello there and welcome back to digital Foundry the wait is finally over PlayStation 5 Pro is here and we're now able to present our full review well as full as it can be as we've had less than a week of hands on time with the unit so usually I handle the hardware reviews at digital Foundry but for this one we're going parallel three of us are combining our Impressions and our testing to bring you what we what we hope will be the Best possible review we're capable of in the time so joining me first of
all John linan hello hey good to be here Rich yes we've been spending a lot of time with the PS5 Pro still capturing uh our very own Audi sirly is here behind me capturing more Spider-Man uh for upcoming videos as well so there's going to be a lot happening over these next few days all resources are being deployed uh which brings us to Oliver McKenzie hello yes Rich the next few Days and indeed possibly the next few months be very busy with PS5 Pro content I suspect absolutely okay well let's just get straight into it
um let's talk first of all about Hardware um Impressions what do we make of the console now John and I shared some initial impressions in uh the epoch making unboxing video that we did and you know generally I think the takeaway was that it's a very uh well-built decent console it's it's it's much Smaller than we thought 3.1 kg it's it's lighter than the uh the launch model by you know considerable degre agree uh I'm actually quite taken with that I think it's it's pretty good and um I can't comment on the thermals without ripping
it apart and inserting probes Etc but uh it's just as quiet as any other PlayStation 5 um John what do you think yeah I tend to agree uh I was as you saw from the unboxing I was taken back surprised I would say by the size the Size reduction compared to the the base model I think it's a more attractive looking unit um and I think that goes a long way but at the same time it also feels very familiar once you actually get going right uh you slap the disc drive on there as I
did um that process this was my first time doing that process it went fairly smoothly I would say yeah although it required a firmware update before I could actually do so yes uh so it went through all that initially Get it hooked up and then it just behaves exactly like a normal PlayStation 5 uh and this is actually kind of an interesting point because that was one of the big differences between the five and the 4 Pro cuz with the 4 Pro you instantly got that 4K UI and the whole user experience felt tailored for
this new machine but obviously we're already in the age of 4K so you don't get that and as a result it just feels like uh a continuation of the PS5 but still as you said the hardware itself is nice the ports everything on it is well located uh I feel like it's a solid machine overall based on these first few days with it yeah uh the optical drive does have the online requirement as well got some capture of that here yes a bit unfortunate I still think that the pro being a pro model and the
fact that it's appealing to uh the core Enthusiast who's probably been with PlayStation for years should have had a Physical Drive In The Box and I want to note Rich real real quick on that I was looking for games that are PS5 Pro enhanced like motor uh what is it Fest the crew uh Lords of the fallen and such and I was like oh maybe I'll grab those real quick the prices on the store are still 79.99 for Lords of the Fallen $69.99 for the crew motorfest i instead found copies online for 15 bucks a
piece so it's just an illustration of why it's not just about collecting a preservation Or anything like that it is a price thing and yes there are sales sometimes exactly if there's no competition in that space that's that's not good for your wallet and I think that's definitely a situation here where if you're a new PS5 Pro owner you can't find the disc drive you don't have the disc drive you're going to be getting raged over the coals right okay um Oliver let's talk about uh your impressions of the unit yeah yeah it's Surprisingly not
that large even though I've seen the harder before it was still a little bit surprising to me it's just a little bit larger than a PS5 slim model it's smaller than a PS5 launch model by quite a margin I would say and it's quite light as well like you mentioned quite similar looking to a slim machine I kind of wish they' done a little bit more to differentiate it maybe a different color for the face plates maybe a bit more of a break or Maybe like a spike or something bold right um between those two
face plates they've done that kind of three stripe design but it's not that um distinctive I would say even the PS5 or rather the PS4 Pro I think was a bit more distinctive in its physical characteristics with that kind of three layer sandwich as opposed to the two layer sandwich of the base PS4 unit there um but you know with respect to that PS4 Pro that unit had a bit of a Reputation for being very loud especially as it matured and here I noticed when I powered the unit on it was very very quiet the
heat that came out of it was of a similar character in terms of its hotness to a regular PS5 console and I think that probably like the overall design is pretty welld designed here and I suspect it will probably age pretty well because the ps5s that I've had have aged quite well as well so I think this will probably be A console that continues to be relatively quiet continues to be pretty well behaved under load at least over the lifespan of the console I would suspect based on on what we've seen so far with the
PS5 design MH absolutely um okay so let's move on we're going to go a bit deeper now um I want to talk about the HDMI controller on the PlayStation 5 Pro because um John there there's problems with the HDMI controller on the base PlayStation 5 32 gbits per second Bandwidth which basically means that you can't get 120 HZ output at 444 RGB right it's chroma subsampling down to 422 right that's correct and yeah for those unclear with chroma subsampling you're essentially processing the different colors at a different resolution so you lose some Fidelity uh it's
actually very difficult to spot during normal games it's most obvious if you load up something like a very fine per pixel image like a computer desktop or small Text with a lot of detail in it then you can actually see some of that fringing and a little bit of noise and artifacting around things uh we had hoped that the PS5 Pro would essentially conquer this because as we know it now supports 8K output which you'll get to in a moment there Rich yeah unfortunately uh the 4K 120 mode is still limited to 422 so even
if there have been changes made uh it does not address this Fundamental limitation and we're still limited to 32 gbits per second it seems as a result when in 120 htz mode okay so here's the thing right um 8K output requires essentially twice the bandwidth of 4K at 120 htz uh so the display controller has got to be upgraded right that's just pure logic so we kind of think it is but not in the way you might expect so we've got capture here of a PS5 Pro attached to an 8K screen now looking at the
signal types supported We've got 8K there or 4320p uh but looking at 4K 120 HZ is still limited to 422 uh so now connecting the pro to my 8k capture cards the pro isn't having it the menus say I need both 60 HZ support which I have got but also DSC which my capture card hasn't got DSC is um display stream compression so Theory crafting time here but I think Sony has added compression support to the display controller but it's likely still limited To 32 gbits per second of bandwidth um I guess the good thing
is that display stream compression is lossless to the best of my knowledge so there's no loss of quality and actually on an 8K supported screen you will get full resolution 8K RGB support at 60 HZ with HDR but as there are no capture devices I'm aware of right now that support DSC we can't show you 8K at the moment that was the problem we had when we went to visit code Masters for the uh F1 opportunity a few weeks back uh which is quite interesting AK John still not interested right not not currently I mean
I think what that fundamentally means is that everything's going to be scaled barring these few random examples and I'm not into that even with a pixel density like that which would help a lot uh you're still going to be relying on upscaling which introduces some additional blur to the final out put unless you do a nearest neighbor scale Um and you know I also don't want any additional processing on top of that and like you said there are fewer 8K displays now than there were in 2020 I would say that out well at least from
certain lineups for instance LG used to offer more 8K displays right they've kind of rolled that back they're they had these top end 8K oleds even uh and there's just less of this stuff now uh basically if you go To your local display store and browse around you'll find that where once there was many 8K screens on display in sort of a showcase uh fashion there's now just 4K larger screens they're pushing up towards 100 Ines and Beyond now uh which is interesting yeah but I I think it's just we've realized that 8K it's just
at the moment a bridge too far in terms of delivering content right also I mean I think from Sony's perspective even though they're sh an AK console the World's first AK console in fact which you'd think would be a point of some marketing triumphalism you know or at least lab on the box right well exactly they don't have a label on the box so they don't really seem to want to tell people it's n console maybe they're worried that people with 4K displace will think oh this isn't the console for me or something but just
to speak to John's point I think Samsung is the only TV manufacturer that is now shipping 8K Panels every single year I think you're right um other manufacturers like you know the topend LGS the topend son they're all whether you're talking about LCDs whether you're talking about oleds they're all 4K sets this year in 2024 I think they were all 4K sets as well in 2023 so it really you'd have to go back a couple years to find like 8K Sony's 8K LGS um and like for my purposes yeah they are getting cheaper but like
I looked at the qn 900d which is an 8K Version of the Q 90d that I have back there I was considering buying it possibly uh when I got that panel but it costs oh more than three times as much as the q19 in the same size and also the panel is worse in some respects it only does 1400 nits Peak brightness not 2100 nits is my Q 90d so for my eyes my uh light loving eyes you know 2100 is a lot better than 1400 so for sure for me it's like well you spend
three times as much most of the time you're getting a like a Probably a worse image cuz it's scaled and you're getting a worse panel possibly as well so it just seems like kind of a raw deal and frankly at that pixel density unless you're way over 100 in I feel like the difference is extremely difficult to appreciate your eye can't really resolve to on in a PC situation more so because you sit very close but watching a TV from even a close viewing distance your eye can't resolve that detail yeah which is Perhaps the
point it's like the whole Retina Display concept right this whole thing of like there's so many pixels and you can no longer distinguish the pixels is what they're going for but still not really I said it before but to me AK basically represents really good anti-aliasing as opposed to you know a massive boost to core image quality and know it's good anti-aliasing when viewed at a distance um I did see the F1 uh game playing out at 8K and um it's fine On static uh menus and stuff and it's fine in game when the movement
isn't really a thing but in motion there is Breakup because it is you know a taau upscale from 4K uh it's it's a technical curiosity it's a nice to have but it's not a defining feature of the professional I don't think okay let's move on we just been talking about the menus the menus also include uh a PlayStation 4 image enhancement feature now we didn't really know what that was Before we actually went handson with the unit we were thinking maybe it's just like okay extra horsepower means better image quality and dynamic resolution scaling games
but that's not the case it is a feature that's toggleable on the menu and it does actually do something quite interesting now Oliver you're going to be doing a full video on this but how about some Cliff Notes on uh on on your observations yes I'll give you the Rundown here so essentially you boot up your PS5 Pro go into that display settings menu there's an option to enhance image quality for PS4 games it says enhance image quality in the settings for PS4 games it's turned on by default so if you boot into PS4 software
you'll kind of figure out what's going on pretty quickly I think if you turn the setting on and off which is that you see quite a noticeable difference in the appearance of those games if you look at 2D elements like UI and text they actually look quite 4K now uh text is a lot sharper um 3D content is Al also altered considerably like in a game like Destiny where the aliasing artifacts in the original have been smoothed a little bit the lines look clear the image almost looks like it has anti-aliasing that's being performed in
a 4K pixel grid so it kind of lines with a 4K pixel grid there so it looks a bit cleaner but when you do resolution counts you Quickly realize like okay this is a filter because the base game content is still being rendered at the same resolution you're not getting any kind of additional grunt there you're really getting a post-process filter it appears like um the issue is that it doesn't really do anything for temporal aliasing given that it's probably working on a single frame as input as a postprocess it gets tripped up pretty easily
by post-processing so if you have like Chromatic aberation it doesn't know what to do with that if you have film grain like I played the order and it just doesn't really know what to do with it so it doesn't do too much it seems like because there's film all over the image it also doesn't seem to apply to games that output above 1080p so like in OverWatch 2 for instance that's a 1080p game but the UI is 4K it doesn't apply at all so I think it's a good idea I think it's cool I have
done some Comparisons that I'll go into in a stand one video with LS1 which is a lossless scaling machine learning algorithm I've also done some compar with FSR with the RTX super resolution that's available on Nvidia gpus um and it is kind of comparable to those Solutions I would say it's giving you a better image in a lot of respects it can give you a noticeable Improvement but it's not going to be a gamechanging Improvement it's not going to be like d LSS or pssr For that matter or FSR 2 or any of these other
solutions that can do so much with so many more inputs obviously then a simple post-process filter could could glean from a PS4 software so I think it's a cool idea but at the moment it's kind of a nice to have feature don't buy a PS5 Pro for this basically the take away but it's nice it's nice to have it it's nice to see Sony caring about the stuff and I think it is kind of cool for these older PS4 titles in particular where they can't take advantage of PS5 Pro very well normally right that we
can go back and we can pay maybe get a post-process enhancement that could run on the on the GPU there that could be nice cool John you gave it a go as well right yeah a couple thoughts I have uh I really like what it does for 2D elements like user interface text fonts it makes them genuinely look like there is additional detail being resolved it's not just like An upscale with sharpening there is actually some additional detail there which is really nice uh but along those lines I also tested uh pixel art games because
I was a little bit concerned that it might interfere with the image quality there and thankfully it does not uh it actually produces so it actually works well uh for 1080p pixel art games normally the PS5 would upscale it to 4K based on your output and you would just get kind of a softer scale right so it Makes this the pixel art look a little bit softer than it probably should uh with this feature enabled it actually makes it look noticeably correctly scaled and sharpened Without Really adding noticeable artifacts to it which is what I
was worried about given the different uh direction that they go with that kind of art so that's a positive as well the 3D stuff though it's like you said Oliver not gamechanging but interesting yeah like for instance in Bloodborne which is a game that has a ton of chromatic aberration and lots of Alias thing it kind of doesn't do much for the 3D content but you look at the UI in bloodborne and it's like wow this is this is like almost 4K native UI like it looks really good and it is creating detail um in
that in that text in particular that you would not see with like something like FSR one it's quite compelling in that instance but it's kind of you know some games it's Compelling other games it's not you know most most of the time it's like nice to have but not essential to have essential exactly I'm going to look forward to your full video on that one Oliver um but let's move on okay then so um one of the key features of PlayStation 5 professional is the fact that your existing PlayStation 5 game should in theory run
better thanks to the game boost feature so I had the pleasure of testing game boost which we can now Confirm um deploys the full power or something close to it of the PlayStation 5 Pro to non-pro games uh they run faster and we all know which game we had to test first Elden ring I'm using the quality mode here which runs at a fixed 4K with fixed quality settings uh both of those elements are kind of dynamic in the performance mode but we'll get onto that shortly uh quality mode so this is good for like
for like comparisons to get some sort of grip on the performance Differential so here's the thing you won't get a locked 60 frames per second on PlayStation 5 in uh PlayStation 5 Pro rather in quality mode but you should comfortably remain within the 48 to 60 FPS vrr window uh for most play looking at the comparisons here I've added realtime performance differentials expressed as percentages uh but when the game does run at 60 obviously the GPU is underutilized so the percentage will be lower it's an areas of gameplay where The pro is under 60 that
you should uh see how much extra performance the pro gives seems to max out at a around 35% a typical uh 30 to 35% Delta uh so yeah not a locked 60 in quality Road however then I tested the frame rate mode Dynamic resolution Dynamic features it should be locked to 60 easily but it's not so I'm guessing possibly the gamees DRS system doesn't quite know what to do with the horsepower is also the possibility that we're CPU Limited in Some respects even so vrr will SM smooth this out so the pro still the best
place to play on consoles even if it's not everything we want it to be you gave this a go didn't you John yeah because this is a game that I played through on Xbox series X that was previously the best place to play it because of the wider vrr window but obviously it regularly falls into the 40s uh the PS5 Pro essentially solves that completely uh as you say performance mode in my Testing was able to stay well in the VR range pretty much all the time so it's very smooth and that's the mode I
use on Xbox and that PS5 also gets per object motion blur which looks really good which the Xbox version doesn't seem to use in that mode uh for some reason and then what surprised me is that the quality mode is actually very usable now and that runs better than performance mode on Xbox uh and you get the you actually it now mostly stays in the vrr Window not 100% as your values show but it's close and it's usually in the ' 50s and it's it's a noticeable boost in sort of like Clarity uh and it's
still fluid so that was I thought that was a huge Improvement in my experience and I kind of want to dig back into it because I did not play the DLC yet start over and uh play through on PS5 I bought a physical copy in Japan and going to go through it so let's do it cool um I also did some tests against The PC version uh quality mode uh quality mode settings equivalence basically um or as close as we can get to it up against the PS5 and the PS5 Pro so fixed 4K there
fixed settings I'm using an RX 6800 here as many believe it offers Pro level performance uh the thing is though uh the 6800 there are PC style stutters throughout but uh in terms of actual gameplay it's way way way smoother so I'm going to be interested to do more sort of uh quality comparisons uh performance comparisons uh between various PC parts and the pro based on real world um uh performance right now all of the sort of conjecture about the performance of the PlayStation 5 pro has been based on Sony's statement that it's 45% faster
but certainly uh game boost uh it rarely gets there um I was also curious about uh rate rasing support on the pro and whether game boost Taps into The extra features because the pro has extra RT features right I was curious if the backwards compatibility would kick in with those features similar similar to the way it does on a PC but I don't think it does so I'm using control in photo mode here which unlocks frame rate and of course we have returned to the corridor of Doom uh the first comparison seems to offer performance
boost in the region of about 31% kind of similar to the Elden ring boosts uh the following Scene again from the corridor of Doom 32 33% boost overall also did a couple of scenes outside the corridor which are lighter uh the pro can run faster still similar differentials overall 33% so back compat can't tie into the extra RT features of the pro as far as I know it just Taps into the raw performance um yeah so that's quite interesting I mean it's it's great but it has its citations um but um I think there's genuine
application in the 120 Htz mode uh Devil May Cry here uh special edition you can unlock the game to run in 120 htz mode I'm using uh first of all Graphics mode with raid facing which essentially removes the 60fps limit so we always have that differential there I tried the info in graphics mode very similar performance increases overall but there are some instances where it does seem to go higher than that 35% threshold maybe it's the sampling rate on my performance Uh comparisons there which is higher in 120 HZ mode but who knows uh in
performance mode though still with rt enabled the differentials can go higher but I think the key Point here really is that with vrr performance RT mode um you're just getting a better High frame rate gameplay experience I think you'd agree with that right John absolutely yeah I think this is really important too because this is one of those weird games that never received a PC update Right it's only Devil May Cry 5 Standard Edition on PC without the r tracing and because of the performance demands of this game uh dmc5 SE was it was never
really possible to really enjoy the r tracing mode I felt uh you had to settle for not a great frame rate if you wanted decent looking uh rate tracing finally it feels like it runs the way you would expect and I found the quality mode with rate tracing and vrr to be absolutely excellent as a result it stays pretty Much above 60 uh by and large and it just feels responsive and it looks great and it's kind of become like the best looking way to play dmc5 now which by the way it's still a stunning
looking game um Oliver do you have any thoughts on the game boost did you give it a go uh I did give game boost to go and the first protocol for me was metaphor fantasio because that that game uh kind of infamously uh does not run at anything Like a stable frame rate on PlayStation 5 consoles on Xbox series consoles basically on anything almost um it runs at 1656 p and it's like 40 to 60 FPS is on PS5 it's not a good experience totally like unlocked frame rate it also has a 120 Herz mode
which again does not work well because the game of dips even below the vrr window on PlayStation 5 quite frequently um I speculate ated in my video last month that PS5 Pro would basically fix it and lo and behold it Has it's basically a locked 60 FPS now it's a very smooth experience even in areas where the bass console was really struggling um in spots at at the worst I saw was in a spot where the Basse console was like 44 FPS 43 FPS PS5 Pro was like 55 56 57 and that's like a pretty
extreme scenario so even without vrr this game is totally saved great experience and this is like probably the most challenged recent release I've seen on on the consoles in terms of hitting a Consistent frame rate and it is obviously a very popular game now lots of people are playing it um and I think it's just about perfect now on PS5 Pro so if you get the most powerful console in the world you can have a game that looks about 10 years at a date for to get a stable 60 FPS on a console if you
spend uh $700 on a console that's pretty extraordinary I also tried out a couple other games one other game I tried out was Ff16 which ran unlock performance mode most of the time much of the time except in combat John covered that obviously weird Behavior there um I did not play too much but Pro unfortunately does not deliver a lock 60 FPS it's like in the 50s a lot I think there what might be happening is the dynamic res is just kicking in and it's not load balancing in a way that we would like probably
um because it does have a dynamic resolution system so it's kind of like There are some positives here a big positives with the Boost potentially and it does apply by the way to all games there there's no way to turn it off it's just always using the whole GPU that's important to note there's no like PS4 Pro Style game enhancement might break your games in this case they're just applying it to all games it seems like um I think that even though it isn't like a gigantic Improvement in some titles because of dynamic res because
of VR and lots of titles with unlocked modes because of the occasional odd title like metaphor Fantasia that's just like running up in a slightly running in a slightly messed up manner um I think that there are probably a lot of examples here and where probably just scratching the surface a little bit of what can be done with this but yeah I think there are a lot of games probably that will get decent enhancements from game boost and that will really help People with like big libraries play older titles that especially they might have vrr
modes you know those unlocked vrr modes in lots of games they don't run so well necessarily on bass PS5 maybe they'll run quite a bit better on PS5 Pro I have a few more to chime in as well here very briefly uh Silent Hill 2 benefits that may receive a patch actually I'm not sure but that that essentially eliminates the stuttering issues that I noticed it Smooths out Both performance and quality mode so performance mode is now mostly 60 with a cup little dips here and there but VR smooth that out but it's very close
uh the 30fps mode on base PS4 actually had a lot of slowdown which was extremely shocking uh anytime you would be attacked by certain enemies and that is also eliminated as well as the running around stutters that it's suffered from it's just a lot more consistent uh Silent Hill the short message that Little hex to drive free Silent Hill experience also fixed now runs at 60 FPS properly whereas before it was extremely unstable uh so that's a huge Improvement there uh Suicide Squad I randomly tested and I didn't spend too much time with it but
it seemed to those sort of Skips and stutters and dips that I saw in the city have largely been cleaned up but maybe they're also cleaned up on the base system but it definitely felt better in my experience then there's three others To quickly mention ghostwire Tokyo uh it gets much closer but not locked to by any means the 120 hertz output so you can play that game in 120 htz mode and it actually allows the frame rate to be uncapped and in the quality mode now you're getting mostly North of 60 uh and the
performance mode is north of 100 I believe so it is noticeably smoother which is interesting but it still has some weird little like hiccups and stutters which the game has always Suffered from so it did not fully fix it but it is smoother um armored Core 6 as well uh this was a from software joint it ran better than Elden ring ever did but it still had dips on actual on the regular PS5 it's cleaned up in my experience that was my uh game of the year when it came out last year I guess and
it's freaking awesome and now it's actually quite a bit better on PS5 lastly uh gt7 pack patch hasn't launched yet and I decided to try it out and what Was interesting about this now is you can run it at Native 4K mode in the 120 HZ mode and now it achieves a completely locked 120 FPS playback in Native 4K mode which previously it was in like the 80 to 90 FPS range with the uncap VR mode now it's just flat 120 you also get 120 FPS uh replays which there can be tiny little dips here
and there but I've never seen replays this smooth in GT before so it's quite a treat and weirdly I would assume that these options might Go away once it's patched so right we'll see we'll see what happens I think my sort of final takeaway uh is that you do seem to be getting the full power of the PlayStation 5 professional deployed on older games uh but that does raise the question of the 45% extra Aster performance because I don't think you're getting that level question is whether that applies to Pro level games or Whether there's
some restrictions in place uh that apply to game boost so maybe you're not getting the full performance level I think ultimately if you look at your base PlayStation 5 increase the frame rate in GPU limited situations we'll talk about CPU limited a bit later uh then you know apply that 30% to the freight rate number you have and that's pretty much what the pro will give you um and if you know if it gets you to 60 great but it's not a give not Every game is going to get to 60 but uh I'd say
it's certainly a very very interesting feature nonetheless something I didn't have time to test that much um you would expect games that are locked at a par a particular Target performance level 30 or 60 but are using Dynamic resolution you would expect the image quality to be cleaned up um I tried it on Metro Exodus actually I didn't actually see a massive difference there but you know mileage will vary on A title to tile basis uh but more to come on game boost we want to check it out with some other titles um but let's
move on okay so now we're going to move on to um actual game performance and what the new features of the PlayStation 5 professional mean for all of that we're going to kick off with the element that's probably most contentious about it which is the fact that the CPU isn't really changed at all from the base PlayStation 5 um this is slightly Problematic because we have found a number of games where there are CPU limitations um I'm going to quickly cycle back to game boost first of all because um the there's actually a mode on
PlayStation 5 um Pro where developers can actually opt in to having 10% extra CPU clock and uh that comes at the expense of a little bit of GPU performance um so I tested it in cyberpunk 2077 which hasn't been patched but this is the classic cherry Blossom Marketplace run it's not quite fully synchronized here but you can definitely see what's happening running around that Marketplace in a circle uh the frame rate dips beneath 60 frames per second and the dip is considerably more pronounced on the uh base model still not quite 60 on the pro
model though but you can look at the performance differentials there and it's exactly in line with what you would expect from an extra 10% of CPU clock so Um we can confirm that game boost isn't just boosting um graphics performance you are getting that 10% of extra CPU clock um the other test I did and this one is for a pro enhanced game um and that is Boulders Gate 3 the classic City run um act three we've got a save that's like 100 hours in and uh we can actually do a run through the city
and you can see that um on the left there the base PlayStation 5 on the right is the pro enhanced version of the game game we're Still CPU limited and you'll see that similar to cyberpunk the performance differentials are again in line with a modest bump to CPU clock so um Oliver I think this is probably the primary limitation I mean a lot of people are looking at PlayStation 5 Pro thinking you know should I give up my PC or or you know Should I stick with PlayStation and not move to PC and I think
the defining limitation of the pro which we've got to accept is that um even Mainstream CPU performance now in the PC space is significantly better than the Zen 2 in the PlayStation 5 Pro so you've kind of got to accept that limitation with the pro right yeah I mean this is a midgen refresh console so the emphasis is obviously not on some of those more kind of fundamental areas of the console design I would say like the CPU but here um I mean right now high-end PC CPUs are about twice as fast as the PlayStation
5 pros CPU but I I think what we're seeing In most titles nowadays on that Target console uh Hardware is that basically they are mostly delivering 60 FPS like I don't think we're in quite a cataclysm of uh games that are are failing to hit their performance Targets on Console I think most games are basically there plus or minus some stutters and issues like that but obviously in titles like balers gate obviously in some more CPU limited games like you mentioned with cyber punk in certain areas you do run Into some problems and there the
PS5 Pro will not save you it might be good for an extra 10% of performance but it's not going to it's not going to save your performance it's not going to be that kind of generational leap in CPU performance that would actually fix those problems um but the 10% is nice I mean it's nice to have something at least absolutely games that are slightly off their performance targets due to CPU limits we'll see a boost there and you Know I honestly think that you should be running a vrr capable display if you can afford order
$700 console okay let's move on um another aspect of the PlayStation 5 professional that is one of the key selling points I guess um well there's the big three right and one of those big three is enhanced rate racing support um John you've been looking at some games and rate racing support has indeed been enhanced on a range of Titles uh what CAU your eye well obviously the first ones I wanted to check out was the Insomniac group I'm actually working on a full video for that so I don't want to go into too much
detail here but Spider-Man 2 is the one that received the most and I think what I found is that the improvements are nice but relatively subtle and it feels like you can tell that the game wasn't necessarily arted up with this in mind from the beginning but essentially it Means things like for instance what they call the key Light Shadows it's actually the sun Shadows it simply allows distant buildings and structures to properly cast Shadows on themselves uh which previously you didn't get at a distance there's also improved rtoo which as expected adds occlusion shadows
in spots where there previously were none or where it was more uh generalized and kind of fuzzy with the solution they had in place so that's more accurate there's Also a screen space Gi pass which I will show in more detail in the video it's again it's a minor thing but it's there this feels like Insomniac essentially like going back and adding some additional things that are kind of cool but they don't radically alter the game's visuals uh when we get to the pssr stuff perhaps there's a little bit more to say because that I
think that's more effective in terms of what it does to the image quality yeah overall Absolutely but there's there's other games as well right that have rt um and I think Oliver's played some of them as well one of them I wanted to note because this this is a weird one so it's Dragon's Dogma 2 right this one has all sorts of weirdness going on we got to figure out how we're going to talk in more detail about this but in the daytime the RT with pssr enabled has like a weird splotchiness to it it
feels very unstable in a way I think you Mentioned this in your impressions before Oliver where it doesn't look quite right any anytime you move the camera you just kind of create these huge patchy holes in the rtgi right it's most obvious in the performance pssr mode but it is present across all the pssr modes and I checked this against the game on PS5 here and it's not nearly as apparent there there is some lag to the rtgi but it's not nearly as apparent as with pssr but the upside I guess of This if you
can call it that is if you do want to turn off RT it completely disappears this issue but it's really distracting I think it's kind of broken looking I pointed it out to the Capcom reps when I was looking at it two months ago and I said this is not right right and they kind of looked at me like I was speaking Spanish so uh I don't know if it'll get fixed but it is an issue still in this in this launch code unfortunately and uh it is annoying I Would say agreed any other games
you want to bring up Oliver you've looked at Alan Wake quickly haven't you that's got a 30fps RT mode I have I have I have looked at Allen wake um Allen wake gets Ry Reflections in its quality mode they look really excellent they add a lot of depth to the game they fix a lot of issues with SSR that can be really unflattering when SSR is off screen or even when it's on screen cuz it has kind of grain to it on PlayStation 5 and Other consoles that I don't do not like too much it's
probably the effect from the PC version the RT effect that makes the biggest impact in the visual so it's nice to see an on Pro they're bringing over the most impactful piece of rtte over to the consoles there um in terms of other games I played a little bit of f124 like we saw from Tom's preview and from my Impressions on at the at the PlayStation event a couple months ago they're getting rtoo and RT Reflections On top of D DGI um add a ton of lighting detail into the game that would probably be very
expensive on bass PS5 only compromises image quality not perfect does look very 4K like but there is some breakup in it especially on like fine geometric elements with sub pixel detail like fences and things like that not not perfect but still a pretty good upgrade overall um adding two RT effects on top of the PlayStation 5 feature set there also in Hogwarts Legacy unfortunately Hogwarts leacy patch is not live when I played it a couple months ago it was quite good but uh I I do want to see more of that um when it does
get the the final patch there G there's also a gt7 of course yeah gt7 we don't have the patch yet but it should look quite compelling I think um but there are some that are a little less successful like in Veil guard where they add rtoo to the performance mode which doesn't add too much to the visuals I think and it also Has some negative impacts on image quality that we can discuss a little bit later but it seems to push performance in particular down below 60 FPS quite often which I think is a byproduct
of the CPU cost which Alex noted I believe in his Impressions that on an RX on a 3600 rather that it would uh potentially drop below 60 FPS with some of those RT features enabled so I think that's possibly what we're seeing there which is not uh a super positive development Relative to the Basse console um but I think the early results are really promising I think Formula 1 is a highlight I think Hogwarts Legacy will probably be a highlight I think the insomnia games are cool what they're doing there um I think that probably
with the PS5 Pro like you might get one or two more retraced effects above PlayStation 5 um and I think that's a pretty cool thing you know I think that's pretty Cool and possibly developers could do more extensive things within in the future but so far I think from like F1 we can see developers can really push out rate tracing on the console um just that we need more developers to follow in there in their lead I suppose yeah I was really impressed with F1 to be honest the um the feature set that they've got
in there is really impressive the performance is good as well uh some other uh notes about F1 I'll talk about later particularly when it comes to power War which is quite amusing um but uh yeah I think my take away from this is that um third party wise we kind of seeing effects that are present on PC kind of being ported across to PlayStation 5 Pro which is a good thing but um I'm really looking forward to uh the time where maybe the first party studios are actually targeting the hardware specifically everything we've seen from
sodi thus far Is essentially retrofits right and um I'm looking forward to seeing what they actually do when they're specifically targeting the proe right okay let's move on let's talk about pssr the AI based upscaling solution um I'm not sure how much we can actually add to um the coverage we've already done with Ratchet and Clank and The Last of Us Part Two uh that was during the uh pre-release period but I guess we have now played more games we have now got more Impressions and I think it's fair to say that similar to what
we've seen with dlss and FSR 2 on PC um the success of pssr um basically changes um the success level the quality level if you like changes on an implementation based Bas on an implementation based basis from one title to the next um John got any notes about pssr and the games you've tested oh boy do I rich uh there are some huge improvements here uh the big argu well ff7 rebirth is arguably The largest one but we'll get to that the but the one that surprised me that hasn't been talked about yet is Stellar
blade uh I love Stellar blade but its original display modes have what I would say is relatively poor TAA implementation with a lot of noise shimmering Sparkle if you just stand still and look at the image you actually see this noise in motion and it does not look good uh and I talked about this in my original video only the Balan mode Was okay but even that was somewhat noisy uh so for the PS5 Pro patch they've actually added two modes one of them I think is very strange uh the other one is amazing so
the amazing one is uses pssr instead of the prior TAA solution and it also unlocks a high frame rate mode uh which relies on vrr and this one's a little so that's a little bit weird because it does switch to 120 HZ output but it seems to essentially cap itself at 80 frames per Second which they specify in their update text it's like yeah you can enjoy it at 80 frames per second so the game runs at 80 FPS then with vrr then so it does feel noticeably smoother it's just I I feel like it
could possibly go higher uh cut scenes though are always limited to 60 so they come back down but either way 6080 it is very nice looking now on a on a good screen uh that is for sure and if you're not on a VR screen you just get 60 FPS right um now pssr Though my goodness uh it completely changes the image and and it just resolves so much more detail and cleans up so much noise and it winds up massively improving the visuals overall I would say and what was a somewhat dirty looking game
at times it makes it look super smooth and clean and it it is a gigantic leap it's probably the best implementation I've seen yet just in terms of improving overall image quality maybe uh and stability stability is key It's temporarily stable now whereas before it was not which is why the pro Max mode as they call it uh taking one from Apple perhaps uh is so strange that one with high frame rate mode engaged anyway limits itself to 50 frames per second uh and the way they describe this is a essentially this is the original
version's quality mode which was kept at 30 frames per second but now it runs at 50 frames per second um but it does not use Pssr it uses the original TAA but it's native 4K but the thing is that even though it's a lower internal res the pssr mode looks significantly better than the native 4K image with ta AA like it really is it do the detail the resolution everything the way the the temporal stability it's all improved which is why I feel like the pro Max mode ends up being kind of useless because I
think the image quality is Technically worse even if the resolution is higher and it's capped at 50 frames per second if you're on HFR otherwise it's just the 30fps quality mode on a non VR 120 HZ screen so there's there's weirdness there but if you can use I recommend the pro the the normal Pro mode with pssr that's a game changer just like it was we've talked about this before Final Fantasy 7 rebirth again seeing more areas in that it it makes such a Difference it is so much sharper and cleaner than the original version
and it runs very smooth now I feel like even with the visual flaws the game has it just feels much more coherent now because the muddy smear look of the game originally kind of just made the asset the assets that didn't look good it made them look a lot worse and it did not Elevate the good assets you fixated on them a bit right right you fixated on them that's all gone now And it just feels so much better as a result so I really want to play through the game now because it it's it's
a it makes a difference uh another one though that I wanted to mention is actually Demon Souls the Remake from blueo which again in its original state they they had a 1440p mode at 60 and a native 4K mode at 30 and I think the pssr mode which is 60 FPS looks better than both uh you maybe get a little additional detail resolved in the native 4K mode But there's much more uh there's more stair stepping aliasing within the surfaces and just more visual noise like it's less effective as a TAA the TA is less
effective in that original 4K 30 mode and as a result the new pssr mode it just it's so much more temporarily stable and it resol olves more detail in a way that I find much cleaner and more uh visually nice uh I also discovered I haven't played this game since launch I loaded up my uh I did a new game plus on My finished save and boy the new game plus mode or whatever the second round is extremely hard it is way way harder than the normal game uh wow so I didn't get that far
in this cuz I I only have this save here uh available so it's that first area again getting creamed by these enemies but man it sure looks good while it's happening let's talk about a game that doesn't use pssr but has insanely good image quality Horizon forbidden West and I assume the Horizon zero Dawn remaster as well um Oliver you've had a lot of great things to say that about that based on your uh time at the event right um but John you've now spent some time with it on your home setup what do you
think I think they might have achieved arguably just about the best image quality I've seen in a console game really uh it's so good when you consider the density of the visuals how much detail is in them the way it resolves That detail and presents it is so clean and attractive that it's it's honestly mindboggling it looks really really good it feels like you're playing a a high-end p PC game now using everything that you could throw at it from the PC side uh that's that's the upgrade I I feel here uh it's stunning and
there's so much granular detail in the distance the grass the Rocks everything it does not I mean the game is very visually busy right and this just does it justice In a way that the original modes did not especially the original performance mode and even the updated performance mode it's light years beyond that uh and yeah I would say of all the titles we tested this is the one that has the best image quality overall there is weirdly still a quality mode uh that also uses this and it is slightly better I guess but I
really don't feel like it's necessary the the performance one is is extremely close gorilla told me all that does is Like increase the increase the dynamic res internally a little bit but they also said that friends don't let friends play at 30 HZ good good good so they they know now yeah yeah yeah they know it it I mean the closest analog to me is something like dlss where the image is just like in in games with good dlss to implementations it's it's just super smooth super stable handling varied content very well Horizon is a
game with quite challenging I think content Possibly for these upscaling Solutions has a lot of foliage has hair has a lot of complex movement when you're doing combat and stuff like that everything I threw at it perfect just like looked awesome foliage looked great like the old uh I thought the old checkerboard mostly looked fine but again you go back to that you look at the foliage and it's like yeah no it's not it's not it's not near as good as this bgrade I thought it looked fine until I saw dlss um on the PC
version and uh side by side you know lower resolutions via dlss are looking better than the checkerboard Solution on the PS5 but it looks as though that's been supremely addressed with this uh upgrade for the PlayStation 5 Pro here very very good stuff I also just wanted to mention cuz I did my own testing on pssr quite a bit of testing in pssr going through a bunch of games uh a bit of a a gauntlet of games um and yeah I would say Horizon for sure is the is the Peak of image quality on PlayStation
5 professional at the moment but that is not using pssr so I I tried to do a deep dive into some of these other games and I tested ff7r quite a bit and I agree with John that that is like definitely up there I did not play Stellar blade unfortunately but I think ff7r you know that is a really impressive Improvement there um part of it is because the Improvement in detail is quite outrageous but also because It's delivering a very crisp very sharp 4K image out of a base resolution that's like not super high
so it's like 11 52p 1224 pish internally it's doing that in a game with a pretty zoomed out third person camera a lot of action and it's giving you a perfect rendition of action scenes with a lot of complex movement and particles but it's not perfect I would say you can have some problems with specular aliasing it can blur patches of foliage when you're just Walking by can have some issues with foliage where it kind of appears overly noisy um even on opaque edges it's not 100% stable it's not as stable as the old 4K
mode in the uh Graphics mode on the PlayStation 5 console um but it is it is a huge Improvement it is absolutely a huge Improvement and it is absolutely one of the best titles in that respect on PlayStation 5 um ratch and Spider-Man we've already covered a fair bit of of ratch in particular those Games look quite good again higher internal rning resolutions look a little bit softer some artifacting again we've covered that K part one and two again look great a little bit more artifacting than their Fidelity modes but again look pretty good but
then there are a few games where pssr is not doing such a good job at the moment and I wanted to bring these up um the there are a couple that I did note actually three that I noted but we've already talked about Dragon stma 2 and that game has some somewhat unique issues with reconstruction okay uh one of them is Dragon Age The Veil guard so in the performance mode the grass in this shot just shimmers like crazy they've added RTO which I suspect doesn't help the internal resolution here is about 864p internally that's
what I counted it going up to roughly 1440p it looks like in that performance mode because it's not nearly as sharp as the Fidelity mode Is in this ttle it's resolving quite poorly and in motion you get a lot of edges that are Alias a lot of edges that look low resolution there are some visual bugs as well where the grass will pop out of existence for one frame and then come back the next which is a an odd issue that kept popping up I hope they do take the time to fix that hopefully this
is just you know pre-release teething issues um ASR also has a lot of issues with a lot of Flickering in the water it's it's a very different looking uh SSR there so it does not look very good the old FSR 2 resolve did look a bit softer in motion but it wasn't it handled the foliage better I would say it handled the foliage quite a bit better um in the Fidelity mode there are some issues but it looks a lot better than the performance mode the other example of a game that I think is not
quite there and I will cover this in more more detail is Allen wig 2 it can look very noisy in Stills almost like you have a kind of film Grain on but you don't have film Grain on but it's just very very noisy like in Stills like I have here um it's an issue in both the performance mode and the quality mode pssr on the upside pssr definitely handles complex movement better than FSR 2 disocclusion is much less of an issue but that noise is annoying and it doesn't clean up a lot of the Shimmer
and Al singring movement Like a lot of the problems that that we saw in FSR 2 are still problems with pssr in this title you're still seeing that breakup you're still seeing that aliasing um but one thing I will note in this title as a kind of PSA to anyone who is playing on PS5 Pro uh is that some of the games image quality issues seem to stem from the fact the game appears to be using low res post-processing so I wouldn't normally recommend this but if you turn Motion blur off in the settings the
appearance of aliasing In Motion can be diminished quite a bit with motion off especially on like fine specular highlights little sub pixel details can improve quite a bit um so I would recommend that possibly especially in the performance mode where I don't really think that uh that motion blur is adding a lot but it is actually giving you a lot of extra aliasing which is weird I also noticed the same behavior On the bass PS5 with the FSR 2 resolve there but it was a little bit less of an issue in that title with FSR
2 I think with pssr it is a bit more noticeable so maybe turn off motion blur here especially in that performance mode the other thing I wanted to not with Allen Wick 2 which is a bit unfortunate is that the performance in that 60fps mode it's it wasn't perfect on PS5 it was pretty good there were some sections that caused issues on PS5 Pro the Performance is worse in the forest area in particular you're running in like the you know upper 40s low 50s points it's not amazing um I'd hope that they could improve that
as well that is unfortunate to see a performance progression there um again they have improved a lot of visual settings from what I can tell like a lot of the Shadow settings you can definitely notice that things have been bumped up there as well yeah that could be improved so I think to me pssr At the moment I think it depends a lot on the game engine the internal resolution the output resolution the presence of transparencies and how they're presented to pssr potentially the presence of Ray tracing um I suspect that we're going to see
a bit of a Divergence in the quality of implementations possibly there might be some minimum threshold of resolution that's wise to clear with the technique at the moment at least and and I think What we what I'm seeing broadly is that some of the third partyy implementations are really good some are a little bit not as good especially at lower input resolutions and the Sony first party stuff is universally good all good basically to you know pretty pretty great in the case of ff7r which is not Sony first party but you know is is is
a closely developed game I have to imagine so that's my impression at the moment um pssr I think it's I think it's a good Technique I think it's doing a lot of good stuff in a lot of titles but for sure like some of these early implementations in those three games I highlighted uh do need I would like to see uh some work done there to improve those for sure okay uh good stuff um let's move on before we talk about our final sort of verdict on the PlayStation 5 Pro let's talk about power consumption
power testing um Okay so we've got some new Visualizations here for the first time we're able to map power consumption into our performance graphs thanks to an assist from from our valued contributor illusion um it's worth saying that the um polling of the power meters like one sample per second so it's not particularly granular but it gives you the LIE of the land in terms of power consumption so um initially I tried Elden rig uh in RT mode um which we didn't test earlier a couple of Takeaways here first of all my launch PlayStation 5
remarkably actually consumes less power than my slim even though the slim has a 6 nanometer processor that is kind of bizarre but it came up in every single test uh now every console will have different levels of power consumption according to the quality of um the Silicon so I must assume that my silicon's sooc quality uh just isn't particularly good a second takeaway is that the performance Improvement on the pro in RT mode is highly variable sometimes not much better than the base models at all so I'm pretty sure that's a CPU bottle NE and
power consumption therefore is only indicative of when the pro is CPU limited right uh so you know that was pretty inconclusive so I retested in quality mode in Elden ring which would be far more likely to be GPU limited much wider performance differential this time but it's still quite amazing to see That the pro is consuming around the same level of power as my slim um yeah and the launch model is is actually Pro producing lower power consumption levels there um but you know for the pro to be in the same sort of ballpark as
the slim it's highly indicative that they're on different processed nodes here possibly 4 nanometer for the pro which is something we didn't expect going into this owing to uh the low GPU frequencies but it Does seem to be the case um I next looked at Spider-Man 2 which has a bespoke pro implementation next so you'd expect the hardware to be taxed bit more um however the differentials here quite similar to the Elden ring quality mode test power consumption very very similar to my slim but as I said I think my Slim's power draw is much
higher than it should be bearing in mind the launch Model results there even so uh yeah flattering comparisons there against the Launch model um so it looks based on the Spider-Man test at least it looks like the pro consumes around 230 Watts then which which is pretty impressive for the performance you're getting must surely confirm a more modern processed technology for the S so s SOC versus the slim uh but 230 Watts isn't the limit I don't think um so earlier I talked about f124 in the quality mode there which really pushes R tracing features
hard remember uses Dynamic resolution scaling To really push the GPU to Max utilization um Power there was in the 230 odd Watts level but it actually peaked at 240 Watts which may seem to be uh indicative of a system uh limit there uh one thing I do want to point out is that my launch and my slim PlayStation 5es have the optical drive attached which I don't think adds that much um to the power draw when it's not being used however to ensure parity with the results the pro also had the um the Optical drive
attached there as as well so um pretty efficient uh piece of Kit I'd say bearing in mind it's not drawing that much more power than my slim but then again my slim seems to be drawing more power than it should be compared to the launch model though that's an awful lot of extra performance you're getting for not that much more power uh so I think you know overall pretty good stuff um any comments Oliver yeah yeah it's I mean it's pretty um it's pretty Impressive there in terms of that power consumption I was expecting like
maybe 300 watts or above if it was indeed a 6 nmet chip but I suppose the size of the console the weight of the console and the very low power consumption of console um it's got to be on a miniaturized process I'd have to think I think what we're seeing with the PlayStation 52 the PlayStation 5 Pro rather is you do see a little bit of that Dynamic clock rate in there where The even though the game load is varying a lot the power is staying within a pretty consistent window of like 10 to 20ish
Watts on that Sprint there um whereas on like the series X I've noted from other commenters who have tested that and who have tested the new series in x 6 nmet revision there are big differences in power consumption between games so on the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro units you should get a pretty consistent power consumption Difference there um or power consumption usage there between titles and like you said Rich uh there is a bit of a silicon Lottery to this so it's hard to say if this is 100% representative of all units you
might have a a bit of a bum slim unit for instance so there is probably going to be some variance between units in terms of how much power they need to expend to hit those kind of system clocks that are specified by the system based on load yeah John I mean in terms Of the sort of uh uh quality of life experience if you like I mean there's nothing sort of crazy about the uh the PlayStation 5 Pro you know it's not belching out tons of heat or anything like that it's a really quite efficient
box really isn't it yeah I feel that we're at the point now where if you think back to last gen there was always these concerns over things like fan noise and the heat output uh oh you got the jet engine Going right there's a lot of those original Pros very very loud um I feel like console noise and heat output has largely been less become less of an issue and I'm happy that the pro essentially continues this it's a very quiet reasonably cool running machine uh I have it shoved down in my cabinet as well
and have been sort of monitoring the temperatures there and it feels uh completely within specifications shall we say which I'm happy with it's it's a Nice it's nice machine in that regard I think for my perspective the only mystery is that if you are going down to um a more modern process node I'm kind of curious as to why um CPU and GPU frequencies aren't really that much different to the uh to to the LGE model that's a bit of a mystery maybe we'll get some detail on that in due course but the end result
is that it is relatively efficient I'd say for the performance that you're getting and um You know when you're looking at those power consumption metrics um you know in game boost for example with Elden ring you're getting a lot more performance for not much more power draw which I think is which I think is a bit of a win okay um let's move on to final Impressions final verdict so to speak uh we can't get away from the fact that the PlayStation 5 Pro is an expensive piece of kit it's $700 us uh £700 in
the UK um prices seem to ratchet up even more in Europe I think partly because of the vat side of things Europe and Japan are real bad yeah and then you've basically you know if you are invested in the physical media which a lot of of the audience are going to be bearing in mind you know who it's targeted at you've basically got to buy the $80 optical drive it's 100 pounds in the UK which is remarkable 120 in Europe um and then there's the whole concept of the the stands that I PID £25 For
um yeah it's expensive but um John I would like your impressions first do you think this is like a luxury item what what's your takeaway here wow that's an interesting question I mean clearly when you look at the price point yes it is a luxury item for sure uh more so than the PS4 Pro I think which was priced to essentially replace the base PS4 right that's not the case here uh and it becomes even worse you mentioned the disc drive msrps but good luck getting One at the MSRP right now they are exceptionally pricey
online as a result of low stock so I hope Sony can resolve that quickly enough um but there are things about it that are a little like people loved in the unboxing the way you tore open that packaging like hul right uh it was funny if a bit excessive uh problem is is like for a for a product that costs north of 500 in every region at this price level I really feel like they let people down in terms of the Packaging it doesn't really matter for the overall product but like you you you expect
something a little bit more premium right like you can still have that Apple like experience I mean Microsoft does it with the Xbox series X I would say which feels very premium when you open that box like just having that flimsy cardboard sleeve and this like artery slicing plast or the cardboard in there it's very cheaply put together and I don't buy sustainability Arguments because Microsoft's packaging is also sustainable they could have done better there but ultimately that's just that initial user experience the first consumer Moment of Truth as they say uh so and then
when you get to the product itself um it's targeted towards People Like Us I think right we have an eye for this stuff we do appreciate those details uh we notice them I think there is definitely going to be a subset of People that will not be able to spot differences there's not going to be anything major where they'll be like wow this is a huge upgrade um it's more like it has so far it has some nice improvements but not game-changing improvements but also it's like it kind of fixes problems in certain other games
as well so it's like a way to improve games that maybe had issues in the past like Elden ring uh which is a weird you can't really sell a product on that but That is a thing that it does which is nice so I like it I think it's a nice machine I would want this either way uh because I do play a lot of console games still um I think they've made some strange decisions with like the disc drive not being included by default it lives up to that Pro name I guess if you
if you feel like you are actually a console professional uh as we are then yeah that's probably a good thing to go for But if you're somebody that's not like super tuned into these things and don't really notice a lot of these flaws or if you're using a much smaller or older TV uh and you sit further away from it I think that also influences things where you probably won't be able to see it but if you're if you're like me using a fairly big TV I think rich and I were both using 77 in
now uh and we I sit rather close to it so the benefit is extremely obvious to me but yeah yeah It's those are the kinds of questions you need to think about okay uh before I go to you Oliver I just want to say John that uh ripped cardboard recycles just as well as intact cardboard and I don't need the box of my PS5 Pro you know I'm I'm not going to sell it or anything I'm not going to uh rep package it and put it into storage it's going to be used you know it's
not the sort of packaging as you say it's not high quality packaging that you want to for it it's Disos actually there there is one more point I want to mention for the for the better of the audience is the uh the the experience of getting the system and transferring your stuff over if you do the system transfer it is long but there's a there's a nice thing here that we have to mention actually two nice things if you take out the nvme drive if you installed an additional nvme Drive in your PS5 you can
just transfer that to the pro and it will work uh cool you Don't you don't need to redownload everything the only cave out there is if you plug in your new PS5 Pro start to download some games then power it off and then put the drive in there and there's a duplicate it will delete those duplicates from the NVM the ones that are already being installed or partially installed on the main system so I recommend doing that switch right away and they will just appear in your game catalog which is awesome uh lastly There's the
the battery there's the C I guess it's like a c it's the little the little dime battery right there was all the talk about the activation and things and have needing to replace batteries and consoles with like the PS4 and the PS3 right it's inevitably something that's going to happen with the PS5 years in advance when the system has no battery it seems like you can't activate and play digital games games uh which is a problem so you need the battery right Well they actually made the battery very usable user serviceable now there's a little
Port under one of the plates just like the nvme drive where you can pop it right out so good thing to Know M yeah I'm going to come to you now oliv for your final Impressions but I do know that directly after the play test you did at Sony HQ I asked you exactly the same question and and I'm guessing that your opinion probably hasn't changed that Much uh probably not no I basically have the same opinion which is that I think it's very compelling Hardware I think that a lot of the mix that you'd
want out of a more advanced console possibly even connection consoles here in terms of an improvement in RT capability that's big uh machine learning capability obviously faster roster performance it's improving where it matters for Mid gen refresh model that's especially important here Because there's kind of an open mandate for develop velers in terms of what they do if they add pssr if they add rate tracing if they improve resolution it's not like PS4 Pro where the target was squarely on highr res displays that's also kind of here with 8K although I expect 8K will be
a fairly marginal feature not a lot of games will support it I suspect personally it's going to be much more about like these settings improvements and image quality Improvements that you make get from pssr and things like this more interesting things the developers will hopefully do with the console um at the same time I think early software there's some really strong efforts from Sony in particular from square enx there's some very strong stuff there where you're basically getting 4K 60 performance modes subjectively speaking good-looking 4K 60 performance modes with pssr in a lot of titles
um in Horizon without pssr but Incredible image quality there you're getting really really high quality uh software that is taking advantage of the console in a good way especially for early efforts but there are also some games that aren't fairing so well obviously talked about Dragon Age we talked about Dragon stma we talked about Allen wake a little bit in in some image quality aspects at least in alen Wake um so I do think that developers maybe need to get to grips with the hardware a bit More maybe Target resolutions might need to change uh
output resolutions might need to change things like this visual features might need to change in terms of what developers are targeting for their PR modes as well um but overall I like new console hardware and the PS5 Pro is very bold and interesting new console Hardware breaking some new ground and creating a new class of experiences importantly above PS5 above series X something that's going to give You the best experience on consoles in all likelihood for most most software um and I'm looking forward to covering it I'm looking forward to seeing what developers do with
it it should be fun to untangle what developers are doing on the pro here um and it's going to deliver hopefully a pretty highend experience for console users so yeah I do think that if you want a better PS5 if you have a bit of money to spare I think the experiences today perhaps Aren't necessarily what you're buying it for it's the experiences in the future and the experiences that we see it can deliver in titles like f124 in titles like gt7 in titles like Horizon forbidden West in titles like The Last of Us in
titles like Ratchet and Clank titles like Final Fantasy 7 rebirth it's those games that you're looking out for and there I think you're going to see more software like that in the future you're going to see more compelling Experiences and you're going to see some value out of that unit that you might buy today and uh and you might get a pretty compelling experience out of it I think that's where you're going to be with the PS5 Pro yeah my sort of final thoughts on this are pretty straightforward you know if you look at um
the concept of paying more for more features and more performance it's basically um the standard sort of thing on PC right you know nobody's really Having discussions there saying I can't really tell the difference between my 4070 and my 4060 because you know it's quantifiably different the PlayStation 5 Pro is Quant if ibly different and quantifiably better than the standard PlayStation 5 the issue here is that developers are actually specifically targeting that standard model to get a good experience so basically it comes down to this standard PlayStation 5 a good experience and that good experience
Would be good for probably the majority of the market maybe the majority of the market still have 1080p screens we don't have that visibility at the moment we don't have that Telemetry that the platform holders do uh but you know even a 4K screen at like you know uh you know longer distance it's still going to be great you know the PlayStation 5 is still a really good console as is the Xbox series X you know that doesn't change so you have good with the base Unit and then you have better with the pro and
if you look at the sale split of the PS4 Pro and the PS4 it was like um I think it was like 8020 and so there are 20% of the audience that want a better console and I suspect it's going to be exactly the the same thing for the PlayStation 5 Pro there'll be a minority of users that want to pay more to get more and this applies to all levels of uh consumer electronics I mean you know I've got a Uh Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra I don't really need one because you know cheaper phones
would do most of the same job but you know I had the funds to spare I wanted the better performance and the better features so I paid for it and that's exactly what the PlayStation 5 Pro is doing what I will say is that the concept of a $700 console um in terms of expanding the audience it's going to do nothing I don't think you know um I don't think That's going to change anything there um and then of course going forward if the idea is that um you know Cutting Edge silicon you need to
pay more for it where does that leave the next generation of consoles that is um a bit of a challenge that is problematic I think and I'm going to be really interested to see how the traditional um console manufacturers Sony Microsoft even Nintendo handle that um but right now you have got this problem of a $700 Console and I think that's you know possibly not an issue when you're talking about a niche product but you know moving into the mainstream with the Next Generation I don't think you can put out a console for $700 but
that's a problem that you know the platform holders are going to have to deal with in a few years time for right now as I said you've got good with a $500 console I guess it will get discounted in Black Friday and you've got better with the Pro as a $700 console if you can tell the difference we've done a pretty good job of um of highlighting how the pro improves matters if you can tell the difference if you have the funds well it you know it's the best console of available at the moment I'd
say I don't think there's any real contesting of that um and that's what I think so I think that's everything I think that's the end of uh all of the discussion points we wanted to have in This with you so thanks for the two of you first of all for um basically uh pulling resources here so we can get something out that's meaningful uh for the Embargo because I was never going to managed to do the vast volume of testing we've managed to do between the three of us so thanks for that and I hope
you and the audience now have a really good understanding of what we think of the PlayStation 5 Pro what its features are what the performance boosts are and uh Hopefully that will inform your purchasing decision uh but that's all from us on this one uh as ever uh thanks for watching and supporting digital Foundry
