PS5 Pro review – a console for people who take gaming seriously

We’ve been playing around with the PS5 Pro for almost a week now, and in our review discussion we find out whether the mid-gen upgrade is worth the price tag

PS5 Pro / Sony Interactive Entertainment

The PS5 Pro is here, and we’ve been playing around with it for almost a week to determine whether it’s worth dropping $700 on a mid-generation upgrade. From its PSSR upscaled resolution tech to its more powerful GPU, we’ve tested dozens of games in various graphics configurations. 

If you have one of the best televisions on the market, the PS5 Pro can offer almost PC-quality visuals on console, but only for certain games. This isn’t quite the no-compromise future Sony marketed, but you’re future-proofing your living room. While cross-platform games won’t blow you away, Sony’s upcoming first-party games will likely show the console’s true potential. For now, we have to work with older titles – some impress, some don’t – and the console itself, from aesthetics to user experience. 

Read more: PS5 Pro first impressions: a great upgrade for a minority of people

I sat down with my colleague, Dave Aubrey, to do a PS5 Pro review discussion, which you can read below. 

PS5 Pro review - the console itself

Dave Aubrey: We’re gonna start right at the top of the experience, which is getting out of the box. Kirk, how do you feel about it?

Kirk McKeand: Well, I got it out of the box, so that was good. I think it’s a much nicer design. If you don’t have the disk drive attached, it’s symmetrical. It fits in your entertainment system better. It’s smaller. It looks a lot nicer. 

The only thing I’m not too sure about is there’s no USB-A on the front of the machine. So that is an issue. But other than that, I can’t complain. It’s nice having two USB-C slots on the front. The visual design is a big step up from the original PS5, which was ugly.

PS5 Pro / Sony Interactive Entertainment

Dave Aubrey: I have been trying to deal with it myself, where I’m like, did I get used to how the PS5 looks over time or is this a big improvement? And I’m really not sure. I do feel like the fins at the sides of the PS5 Pro console help break up the just… – I don’t know how to describe the shape of the original PS5, but the fact that it’s got the little black fins on the sides help break it up into like, four panels, and I think that makes it look more visually appealing.

Kirk McKeand: I think the original PS5 shape is like if you asked a three-year-old to draw a rectangle without a ruler.

Dave Aubrey: It’s something like that, isn’t it? And I’m not sure about how I feel about the weird fins at the top still, but they feel less pronounced, and as a result, it doesn’t seem to bother me as much.

PS5 Pro / Sony Interactive Entertainment

Kirk McKeand: It’s the only console that would look good in a bow tie. I’ll give it that.

Dave Aubrey: I’m pretty eager to get some third-party plates or something, to be perfectly honest. But I do think it’s an improved look. And yeah, the USB-A port on the front, that’s an issue for me as well, because I use a lot of arcade stick controllers, and they all use USB-A. I feel like I’ve got to work around that, which is slightly annoying, but it’s pretty minor. How are we feeling about the experience of plugging it in and just seeing it for the first time? Is it fancy?

Kirk McKeand: Well, it’s got a new startup graphics thing, which, you know, makes it feel a bit flashy. And then once you’re actually into the ecosystem, it doesn’t feel much different. The UI was 4K anyway, it all looked nice on the PS5 base. The only difference is the options you get in the options menu.

Dave Aubrey: How do you feel about the disk drive being sold separately? How’s that affecting you?

Kirk McKeand: Well, I had a disk drive on my OG PS5 and I never used the disk drive once. So for me, it’s fine. I’m sure for people with bad internet it’s not fine. But, yeah, I don’t personally care. 

Dave Aubrey: I like having a physical collection myself. My friend who did buy the PS5 Pro is having a debacle because he didn’t foresee the disk drive shortages, and he already has a large collection of PS4 and PS5 games.

The PS5 Pro doesn't come with a disc drive, but players can buy it separately. / Sony Interactive Entertainment

He was interested in paying the upgrade to get the Horizon remaster because you can pay a tenner to upgrade if you’ve got the original disc. And he can’t put that original disc in because he got the PS5 Pro, and he doesn’t have a disc drive with it. He’s tempted to go the scalping route. I’m trying to convince him to buy an eBay PS5 Slim with a disk drive and then sell that on eBay after taking the disk drive out, trying to get him a discount.

It does feel like Sony is pushing people toward a digital ecosystem. I mean, this whole generation feels like they have done but this feels like a final push, because those disc drives didn’t get restocked along with the PS5 Pro, which is a disappointment.

Kirk McKeand: Looking at the prices on the PS Store, I understand why people who don’t do this for a living would care, because you’re paying like 70 dollars for an old game, whereas if you go down to CEX or whatever, you can pick up for a tenner. So, yeah, I totally get it.

PS5 Pro PS4 image enhancement 

Dave Aubrey: PS4 image enhancement is an all-new feature that offers smoothing for your PS4 games – specifically the ones that run at 1080p or below to make them a little bit more appealing on a 4K screen. And that’s appreciated, but not necessarily life-changing, but it’s a feature.

Kirk McKeand: Yeah, I’ve tried a couple of PS4 games. It’s not something that you notice that much. In the text, you do see sharper lettering and stuff. I believe it’s just a filter so it’s not going to change the world. But then some games came out at the end of the last gen – I played Grip and there’s no difference. It’s still quite blurry in the backgrounds. It’s not going to change the way you play them. PC is still probably the best place to play old games that are available on PC. 

Dave Aubrey: Absolutely. I booted up Ultra Street Fighter 4 because I was struggling to think of older PS4 games I had downloaded and installed, which were also old enough to benefit from the PS4 image enhancement. And yeah, the UI text looks so much sharper. It really does. I was like, okay, yeah, that’s sharp image text. 

PS5 Pro review – enhanced games

Dave Aubrey: I played Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and that one doesn’t have any performance settings, which is nice. It’s just running as it should be. It’s 60fps locked. It’s smooth. It looks high res. I’m not going to pixel count it, but if I didn’t know that that was a PS5 Pro-enhanced game, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. For all I know, it could have been like a 1440p upscaled, and the game was well-optimized. And that’s kind of the issue because the games look great. But to the layman or someone who just doesn’t know what specific details to look at, it just looks good, still.

Assassin's Creed Mirage on PS5 Pro / Ubisoft

Kirk McKeand: You said that one of your friends actually thought that the developers would just choose a graphics mode for you, right? Because Sony pitched it as like the no-compromise console, where you don’t have to choose between performance or graphics, but you kind of do still, because every game has like two or three modes, other than Assassin’s Creed. 

Horizon Forbidden West has three modes. I think it’s Balanced, Pro and then Performance or whatever. And I hope that eventually, developers land on some sort of agreed terminology for this stuff because they’re all called something different. They all do different things. And I kind of do wish that it was just: here is the best. It just toggles it on. Here’s the one that you want to choose. I don’t need all those options because it kind of feels like you’re still compromising.

Dave Aubrey: Yeah, I completely agree. Resident Evil 4 has unique hair strands options. It has the frame rate mode and the resolution mode. It has a ray-tracing option. And then other games would be like, here’s fidelity and performance, or here’s frame rate and quality. Stellar Blade has Performance, Quality, and Balanced, and this adds Pro and Pro Max on top of those.

Stellar Blade on PS5 Pro / SHIFT UP

Kirk McKeand: I think it’s most pronounced in Alan Wake 2 because quality mode on that comes with a bunch of ray tracing features. You probably wouldn’t know if you didn’t already know about ray tracing and stuff, and it tanks performance quite substantially. So I noticed when you try to dodge in that game on quality mode, there’s almost a missing frame there. You kind of stutter. And then if you switch it over, it feels way smoother. It’s unplayable in quality mode, in my opinion.

Dave Aubrey: I played almost all of Alan Wake 2 on performance on the base machine, and the whole time I was like, this is playable, but it’s not good. On PS5 Pro, it’s all improved, but it doesn’t feel ideal. It doesn’t feel like the high-end PC experience, either with the ray tracing or just in the performance mode. It is an improvement, but I feel like it might be the most disappointing PS5 Pro-enhanced game that I’ve played so far.

Alan Wake 2 on PS5 Pro / Remedy

Kirk McKeand: I’d agree with that, which is a shame as well because Control was such a showcase of ray tracing across consoles and PC. So to see this have subpar ray tracing is a bit disappointing. 

Dave Aubrey: Yeah, but it is a great game, and they’ve given it a lot of updates since they originally released so I’m hopeful it will continue to get updates. There does seem to be a trend where Sony’s first-party games are super high quality right now on PS5 Pro and like, third-party games, maybe less so. 

I do think Resident Evil 4 looks fantastic with all the settings turned up, but there are a few areas where you can tell it’s being upscaled. It’s a little bit weird when there’s smoke coming out of the chimney, I can see the chimney’s shimmering where nothing else in the image is. But then, The Last of Us Part One and Part Two, and from your experience with Horizon Forbidden West, it seems like those Sony first-party games are just immaculate.

Resident Evil 4 on PS5 Pro / Capcom

Kirk McKeand: Yeah, and when the next Naughty Dog game or Insomniac game comes around, it’s gonna look incredible, I’m sure. So we’ll see the full impact of it then because they’re probably building those games with this console in mind, whereas this is all, you know, an afterthought.

PS5 Pro review - verdict

Kirk McKeand: I think for those who are like, really in the weeds of video games, and they want to play all the latest stuff all the time, obviously this is the best place on console to do it if you’re bothered about visual fidelity at all. And for PS-exclusive games, they’re going to take advantage of the machine. Wait until the next Insomniac game comes out – you’re going to get all the best ray tracing options on PS5 Pro, with fewer compromises as well. However you feel about it, that last Ratchet and Clank game, even on base PS5, had so many graphics options. You could have ray-traced performance even, and that would be like 40 FPS, I think, with ray tracing. It looked really good. 

I imagine those options will be even more expanded. So when the new Wolverine game comes out, it’ll look incredible. But unless you’re willing to spend 700 dollars on a machine, that’s a slight upgrade and more of a future-proofing thing. I was talking about GTA 6 the other day because no doubt that will come out on consoles first. So PS5 Pro will be the best place to play it because you’ll be able to play at a higher resolution. But if you don’t care about that last sentence, it’s probably not for you.

Dave Aubrey: Yeah. The PS5 Pro supports HDMI 2.1. It can do 4K, 120Hz, HDR, VRR-capable. You know, all of that through one HDMI cable, which is the future. But if you don’t have a TV that supports all of those features, the PS5 Pro is an even more questionable upgrade, because from the testing I’ve done, from the games I’ve played, it feels like I’m finally taking advantage of those features. 

Call of Duty definitely wasn’t looking 4K with the 120fps mode turned on. It might be outputting a 4K image, but it’s upscaled and quite low res internally. We’re getting closer to that legit PC-like experience with a lot of those games, but it’s still not quite there. And if you don’t have a TV that takes advantage of those features, you’re almost certainly not going to see it. It’s going to be a super minor upgrade if you’re on a 1440p screen or a 1080p TV.

Kirk McKeand: I know people in real life who have a PS5 or Xbox Series X, and they have a 1080p TV. I’m like, ‘Why? Why have you done this? You’re not taking advantage of it.’ And they just don’t know what I’m talking about. So the layman just won’t even know that, I guess. You need a $1,000 TV, that’s what you need. So it’s not even just the $700 console investment, it depends on what’s in your household because you don’t want to buy that console for that much money and then realize, oh damn, I need a better TV.