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PlayStation 5 Pro – The first hands-on preview

There's a choice that most PS5 players will be familiar with: “Prefer graphics” or “Prefer performance.” With the PlayStation 5 Pro, Sony's big selling point for its $700 upgrade console is that you no longer have to choose what to sacrifice.

Last week, I was at PlayStation HQ in San Mateo, California, to get my hands on the new console. I played about a dozen games side by side on the PS5 and PS5 Pro, including Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and The Last of Us Part II Remastered. In doing so, I had the chance to experience the improvements firsthand and speak with many of the developers responsible for updating these games for the new hardware. After playing, I have to say I'm impressed with the PS5 Pro's capabilities, particularly the new AI-powered resolution scaling system. The high price has left many people skeptical about who it's for, but if what I've seen is a good indication of what it's capable of across the board, the PS5 Pro has a lot to offer console gamers willing to pay a premium for an uncompromising experience.

Put simply: At the hardware level PS5 Pro is a PS5 with a more powerful GPU. Sony has been coy on exact numbers, but their team says it will have 67 percent more compute units than the base PS5, which has 36. Some simple math tells us it will be around 60, which puts it roughly on par with PCs. Graphics card Conditions with which AMD Radeon RX 6800. Beyond the pure performance increase, Sony is touting two important software improvements that support the GPU: better ray tracing and the aforementioned upscaling system, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR.

Games optimized for PS5 Pro look just as good as they did in the old Favor Graphics mode, while offering the same frame rate and overall performance as the old Favor Performance mode.

I'll get into the specifics of this technique in a moment, but the main takeaway is that Sony promises that games optimized for the PS5 Pro will look just as good as their old “Favor Graphics” mode, while offering the frame rate and overall performance levels of their old “Favor Performance” mode. From what I've played, the PS5 Pro can deliver on that promise.

However, consistency wasn't the be-all and end-all when it came to how developers named the Pro upgrades. It's a bit silly that PS5 Pro options are similarly scattered, just as there hasn't been a universal standard for the various graphics modes on PS5 games to date. Spider-Man 2, for example, will have a new “Performance Pro” mode that combines the base console's graphics and performance modes. The Last of Us Part II Remastered, another first-party PlayStation game, calls the same thing “Pro mode.” At Square Enix, someone decided that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth should call it “Versatility” mode. Meanwhile, other games, like Capcom's Dragon's Dogma 2, have simply added new “Pro” versions of their existing graphics options.

Regardless of what they're called, Sony told me that around 40 to 50 games will have new Pro-ready modes when the new console launches on November 7. But keep in mind that what this upgrade means for each game is, again, inconsistent. If a game isn't designed to take advantage of more power, the options are limited.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, for example, looks absolutely incredible on the base PS5 when set to Graphics, but at the cost of a 30fps cap. Performance mode, on the other hand, feels much better at 60fps, but suffers from significantly lower-quality textures that mar the visual feast. The PS5 Pro fixes that problem, however – the new Enhanced mode gives you all the visual effects of Graphics mode at Performance mode's 60fps. However, Enhanced mode doesn't look much better. better than the standard PS5's graphics mode – at least not in a way that I could tell without a zoomed-in side-by-side comparison.

More powerful hardware means that any game, whether it has a new special mode to take advantage of the PS5 Pro or not, should simply run better than it would on an older console – just as upgrading the graphics card in a gaming PC means it's easier for your system to render a certain level of quality than before. But just putting in a new graphics card doesn't make a game see better, unless you switch to a higher (and thus more demanding) graphics setting that the developers have built in. The same logic can be applied here: the PS5 Pro will have an easier time rendering a game's standard PS5 modes (Sony calls this “PS5 Pro Game Boost” – similar to what we've seen on the PS4 Pro), but things won't look better unless the game's developers release a new mode with more detailed graphics techniques.

In other words, you should keep your expectations in check. The PS5 Pro can certainly dress up a game—and if developers put in the effort, it makes more sophisticated graphics techniques like ray tracing possible—but it's not a magical remastering machine. The updated version of Hogwarts Legacy that I played, for example, showed off some pretty impressive new ray tracing effects, with reflections bouncing off the stained-glass windows of Hogwarts Castle onto its polished marble floors, or students walking through the hallways reflecting off the shiny surface of a suit of armor as they passed. Light and shadow were similarly impressive, as the bright glow of my Lumos spell shattered into a thousand pieces from the tangled web of a Devil's Snare root. But those ray tracing effects did nothing for the relatively simple character and facial models, which pale in comparison to the visual wonder that is FF7 Rebirth. For that, we would have to wait for the team at Avalanche to do the work and update Hogwarts Legacy in the same way that Naughty Dog did for The Last of Us Parts I and II.

Ghost in the machine

All of these graphics and performance improvements are made possible in part by PSSR. AI upscaling has been around in the PC space for several years in the form of Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and enables a dramatic increase in frame rate without sacrificing image quality. (AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution or FSR performs the upscaling via an open source algorithm.)

In short, upscaling allows a game to be rendered at a lower, and therefore less demanding, resolution and then upscaled to a higher resolution. However, traditional upscaling techniques have their limitations – a frame can only be upscaled to a certain extent before the result looks worse than it started with. However, by incorporating AI into the process, upscalers can generate new high-resolution frames without artifacts and other visual defects. In other words, AI upscaling allows a console to start at an even lower resolution and still look great at full 4K, resulting in higher frame rates.

So far, only Nvidia's DLSS has used AI to support upscaling – which has given it a significant lead over FSR and other upscaling implementations in most benchmark tests.

PSSR, meanwhile, uses an AI upscaler that Sony developed in collaboration with AMD—the first of its kind seen in a gaming console or from AMD overall. I mentioned earlier that the PS5 Pro, with its 60 or so compute units, is roughly on par with the AMD Radeon RX 6800, but the RX 6800 (nor any other AMD card on the market) doesn't offer AI upscaling. PSSR does.

From what I can tell, it seems capable of achieving similar results to what DLSS has achieved for PC gaming over the past few years, and I can't wait to see how developers push the graphical boundaries now that the hardware can better accommodate their ambitions. Of course, it'll be quite a while before we see games designed from the ground up to take advantage of this power. But until then, if you decide to invest the hefty price tag, you can at least be assured that you're getting the best possible PlayStation experience money can buy.

For more information, see our interview with Toshi Aoki, Sr. Principal Product Manager for PS5 Pro, and our summary of everything that was announced yesterday at State of Play.

Bo Moore is Executive Tech Editor at IGN. You can find him online at @usebomswisely.

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