PS5 Pro review: how close is your TV?

You don’t need me to tell you the new PS5 Pro, on sale November 7th, is the most powerful PlayStation ever made. The real question: could it possibly be worth $700, the most Sony’s ever charged for a game console?

I think I can answer that — but first, I need you to go find a measuring tape.

Find your favorite seat in front of the TV, then measure the distance between your head and the screen. Now measure your screen diagonally. Do you own a 65-inch or 55-inch TV, the most popular sizes? Do you sit 10 feet away or more? Then no, the PS5 Pro is probably not worth $700. Not even if you have 20/20 vision like me. The improved visual fidelity just isn’t tangible enough at that distance.

But if you sit closer, Sony’s new game console can make select games look amazing. Blades of grass, pillars of rough hewn stone, the weave of a backpack — they pop at higher fidelity. It’s enough of an improvement that I found myself wanting to sit closer, or stand, or even plug the PS5 Pro into a 4K computer monitor to use it like a gaming PC.

With some games, playing the original PS5 could feel like looking through a dirty window. The PS5 Pro has the power to wipe that window clean.

I think it’s important to make this clear right away: the PS5 Pro doesn’t make every game “Pro.” To really see a difference, it requires specially patched “PS5 Pro Enhanced” games — though the always-reliable Digital Foundry has seen it can speed up some normal games as well.

This is no PS6. Sony has made no suggestion that it’ll kick off a new console generation or have any exclusive games. It still plays the same PS5 and PS4 titles using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU cores, gets the same software updates, uses the same excellent DualSense gamepad, and offers largely the same ports.

If you pick games that already run beautifully on PS5, like the excellent Astro Bot, the only differences you’re getting might be physical ones, like the three curved scimitar-shaped fins that divide the console’s upper and lower halves, or how cool and quiet it runs, or how surprisingly light it feels. The PS5 Pro weighs three pounds less than the original 2020 model, even after you add the optional disc drive. The console’s slightly smaller, too.

But the PS5 Pro comes with an extra 2GB DDR5 memory, more than double the storage at 2TB, and — most importantly — a 62 percent faster GPU, with 16.7 teraflops of raw graphical compute. Add an AI upscaling technique called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), and it’s easily the most potent home console yet made.

What that actually means for games is up to each studio to some degree. But in practice, many developers are boasting that you no longer need to choose between smoothness and fidelity; you can have your cake and eat it too with 4K-like graphics at 60 frames per second.

At Sony’s PS5 Pro preview event, I told you how that wasn’t strictly accurate: with only 45 percent more rendering performance, some graphical compromises are still being made. But after spending several straight days swapping back and forth between my original PS5 from 2020 and the new PS5 Pro, testing over a dozen games in all their different graphical modes, I think there’s something to that “best of both worlds” claim.

In every title I tried — while sitting no more than eight feet away from a 65-inch TV — the PS5 Pro was clearly the better place to play.

In The Last of Us, I could see individual blades of grass instead of a sea of green. In Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, I could make out the peach fuzz on Aloy’s cheeks.

In Demon’s Souls and Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and The Last of Us Part II, the enhanced crispness and smoothness of the entire image helped bring cities to life, making their castle walls and skyscrapers and floating ships and post-apocalyptic frozen wasteland feel more real. Everything’s just more… defined.

Even PS4 games can get a bit crisper on PS5 Pro: I booted up Bloodborne, Gravity Rush 2, and my current kid-favorite Lego Dimensions, and each had slight improvements once I toggled a new PS4 image enhancement option in the console’s setting’s menu.

Thing is, my couch isn’t eight feet from my TV. It’s 12 feet, too far to tell a difference between the PS5 and PS5 Pro, because those details melt away. I can just barely make out the difference at 10 feet, sitting on the edge of my seat.

The big exception I’ve tried is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. While I can’t see all its visual improvements leaning back on the couch, Rebirth definitely takes the award for Most Improved on PS5 Pro, no longer forcing me to choose between distractingly choppy or annoyingly blurry. Its new PS5 Pro-exclusive “Versatility” mode offers such a clearer picture than the previous muddy options, the difference is visible at distance; I could see some Final Fantasy uber-fans picking up the console for that reason alone, particularly lapsed fans who haven’t yet purchased a PS5 and only need to justify an extra $270 for the Pro.

Most games don’t have this much room for improvement, though.

And you shouldn’t expect the PS5 Pro to necessarily improve graphics in the ways you might prefer. FFVII Rebirth’s open world still does that pop-in thing where plants and bushes appear just as you’re about to run into them, and Alan Wake II still can’t keep Detective Casey’s sideburns and facial hair from strobing in and out of existence.

Speaking of Alan Wake II, it’s also one of the few PS5 Pro Enhanced titles to offer an optional new ray tracing mode. It’s just ray-traced reflections, a far cry from the full-fat ray tracing the game can offer on today’s beefiest gaming PCs. Still, it’s amazing to see how realistic the Oh Deer Diner’s windows look when you can see the whole world reflected on them, and realistically see through them at the same time — the PS5 Pro handles it well. The game runs much slower, targeting 30fps rather than 60fps, but it’s not so much of a performance hit that it becomes unplayable.

The ray tracing in Alan Wake II (and F1 24) is an intriguing taste of what the PS5 Pro might be capable of in the future — if the console sells well enough for developers to seriously target it with their new games. The PS4 Pro eventually got a long list of enhanced games, but it launched at just $400 with an optical drive, generous trade-in offers at GameStop, and a clearer value proposition of taking your games from 1080p to 4K. Adoption was high; Sony recently revealed that 20 percent of PS4 customers wound up buying a PS4 Pro as well. 

$700 will be a tough pill for some would-be buyers to swallow, especially considering it doesn’t come with an optical drive. Personally, most of my PS5 and PS4 library is on disc, and I had to special-order the $80 optical drive (they’re a little scarce right now!) to get some of my games running. Sony provided review codes for others.

You should know that reviewers didn’t have access to all 55 of the PS5 Pro Enhanced patches that Sony’s promising for launch day. As I write these words, major titles that could use enhancements and have promised enhancements, like the just-released Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Star Wars Jedi Survivor, have yet to release their patches. It’s possible some of the games I haven’t tested look better (or worse) than the ones I was able to try out. But at this point, I feel like I’ve seen the gamut from “good” to “meh.” And like the PS4 Pro, there’s real potential here if developers take advantage of it.  

Ever since Sony announced the PS5 Pro and revealed both its $700 price tag and lack of optical drive, I’ve heard all kinds of people ridicule the company. Some suggest you need a magnifying glass to see the difference in visual quality. (You don’t.) Some suggest you’d be better off building a gaming PC. (You might, but probably not for $700.)

For that matter, I fired up The Last of Us Part I on my mid-range gaming PC today, a PC whose graphics card alone would still retail for around $300. I sat on a loading screen for 15 minutes just to compile the game’s shaders, then launched a game with buggy hair and dull grey mirrors that don’t reflect. I mucked about with settings for 20 more minutes to make the game playable.

Then, I plugged a PS5 Pro into the same 4K monitor. The game loaded almost instantly. It was both beautiful and playable right away.

The kind of person who should buy a PS5 Pro is the kind of person who doesn’t want to muck around. They’ll want the best console gaming experience money can buy, a large OLED display to go with it, and a plan to park themselves real close to that screen.

Update, November 6th: Added links to Digital Foundry for discussion of how the PS5 Pro’s Game Boost can also speed up framerates in some normal PS5 games, and a note about Wi-Fi 7.