It’s officially the most powerful games console to ever wear a PlayStation badge, but Sony’s blink-and-you’d-missed-it PS5 Pro reveal didn’t do a great job of explaining why gamers should be queueing up to part with their cash. “Those games that make you pick between 30fps but clean or 60fps but fuzzy? Yeah, you won’t have to do that anymore. $700 please.”
The PS5 Pro might have a lot more GPU muscle and will make heavy use of AI-based upscaling to boost frame rates, but I’m not convinced that’s enough of a mid-generation leap to justify an upgrade. Sure, you get 2TB of storage onboard – but it’s the work of a few minutes to stick an M2 SSD in your current console – and a whole lot cheaper.
It’s still early days – a nine minute video and a surface level blog post are all we’ve got to go on until Sony talks more about its PS5 Pro Enhanced game lineup – but right now it looks like a serious amount of money for a console that doesn’t even include a disc drive. Even the vertical stand shown in all the press pics is an added extra. All in you’re looking at more than $800. At least Sony isn’t selling the power cord separately – but you’d better believe this is setting the bar for the eventual PS6.
I’m old enough to remember when mid-life refreshes were cheaper than the OG console: the Xbox 360 S, the PS One, the Mega Drive 2. There’s not been a whiff of a planned price reduction for the regular PS5 to coincide with the Pro’s November 7 release.
The PS4 Pro put an end to that trend, but its leap to 2160p resolution and support for HDR gaming were clear upgrades over the regular console – which could only do Full HD, and didn’t get HDR support until a later firmware update. At $399/£349 it wasn’t ludicrously expensive, either. Slightly sharper crowds in Ratchet & Clank and more convincing reflections in Hogwarts Legacy aren’t really doing it for me.
Obviously Sony doesn’t want to fragment its player base by adding a bunch of Pro-specific features – or force developers to work even harder than they already are to support them – but I can’t help but feel the console needs to offer more than just “shinier ray tracing” and “better frame rates”. Especially if this system is going to last a full four years until PS6 arrives, if the gap from PS4 Pro to PS5 is any indication.
AI-driven upscaling may be the PS5 Pro’s saving grace. It’s taken over the PC gaming world, with Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR letting graphics cards run demanding games at frame rates much higher than they’d be able to at native resolution, albeit at the expense of image quality. As devs squeeze every drop of performance from the PS5’s hardware, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution will surely be stepping in sooner and sooner.
Instead of focusing on modest improvements to existing games, Sony should’ve been on the phone to Rockstar. Being able to say upcoming crime opus GTA 6 runs best on PS5 Pro would’ve surely kicked pre-orders off with a bang. Even if Heaven 17 isn’t on the soundtrack.
Having said all that, all is forgiven if it’ll finally mean Bloodborne gets its 60fps update.
