PS5 Pro: what it can actually do for your games

It all comes down to this, then: after taking a look at its packaging, unboxing it and having a taste of what its user experience is like, it’s time to focus on the reason why the PS5 Pro was built for in the first place. That is, the way it can improve on the gaming experience offered by the PlayStation5. Sony made a number of bold claims when the company announced the new system back in September and we’re now able to verify those claims, at least to the extent that a few days of testing and a number of specific games currently allow.

According to Sony, the PlayStation5 Pro should be able to improve – at least in theory – all of your current games: the PS5 games specifically updated to leverage its more capable hardware (named PS5 Pro Enhanced titles), those PS5 games that haven’t been updated but can still work better on the Pro because of its extra power (through functionality built into the PS5 Pro operating system), even a number of PS4 games that may be more than 10 years old by now (through another custom function based on the PS5 Pro’s AI subsystem).

Lots to unpack here. Let’s break everything down.

PS5 Pro Enhanced titles: the best-case scenario

This PlayStation is considerably more powerful than the original PS5, but – since it’s not a PC, where by upgrading certain components one can immediately enjoy better gaming performance without doing anything else – for current or future PS5 titles to really take advantage of the new hardware additional work is needed. Sony recognizes this by awarding every game offering PS5 Pro-specific optimizations the much-discussed “PS5 Pro Enhanced” label, which encompasses practically any type of technical improvement said game might have to show over the standard PS5 version.

Yours truly had around a dozen PS5 Pro Enhanced games at hand in order to deliver his impressions for the PS5 Pro launch, but decided to stick to those he had already played enough on the PS5 as a point of reference. These titles include Spider-man 2, Horizon: Forbidden West, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, No Man’s Sky and, as an extremely late entry, Demon’s Souls. Curious to see how it would perform in 8K, yours truly also purchased F1 2024, which turned out to be quite the pleasant surprise. More on that later.

The overall impression one gets by playing these PS5 games on the PS5 Pro is that, going forward, a lot will depend on the choices developers make with this new system. That’s because different games went down totally different paths in terms of how they leveraged the PS5 Pro’s power: some chose to increase their base resolution, others to increase their frame rate targets, others to find a balance between the two, yet others to add more graphical detail here and there (whether that was actually beneficial or not).

This is somewhat problematic. On one hand, it’s great to see that developers are given free reign when it comes to these decisions (something that will definitely serve certain games well in the future). On the other, this makes it all the more difficult for consumers to understand precisely what they can expect of the PS5 Pro (not everyone will be looking for details on the benefits every single future PS5 release will enjoy on the Pro).

All the different ways developers can leverage the PS5 Pro hardware makes it difficult for consumers to know what they can expect.

Take The Last of Us Part II Remastered, for instance: it was an already beautiful PS4 game that could be played at 4K/30 FPS or at 1440P/60 FPS on the PS5 (a 4K TV obviously did the upscaling from there). It can now be played at 4K and target 60 FPS at the same time on the PS5 Pro “with increased fidelity” to boot – but the extra detail often goes unnoticed and the target of 60 FPS was already met most of the time anyway. Yes, frame rate is now more consistent and the graphics look more dense than ever, but do they really change the overall gaming experience already available on the PS5? Yours truly believes that most people would answer in the negative.

The same goes for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, which focuses on raytracing effects more than any other launch PS5 Pro game: it’s now offered at a rock-solid 60 FPS in the same graphics quality as before or at 30 FPS with a lot of added reflections and other lighting effects. It’s mightily impressive to look at, but it does not alter the feel of the whole entertainment experience by much. It’s the same with Demon’s Souls, which is now offered at AI-assisted upscaled 4K resolution targeting 60 FPS, along with better lighting: welcome improvements both, but not welcome enough to warranty the purchase of a new PlayStation model.

On the other end of the spectrum, titles such as Spider-man 2, No Man’s Sky and F1 2024 convincingly demonstrate what Sony was preaching back in September: that is, how players can now play beautiful-looking PS5 games without being forced to live with the dreaded 30 FPS threshold or frame rate instability in general. Spider-man 2 is now presented at 4K/60FPS on the PS5 Pro with full raytraced reflections (the most important lighting effect for this particular game) or at 4K/30FPS with a lot of (PC-style activated) raytracing effects. Sticking to 4K/60 with RT reflections and playing Spider-man 2 like this for a while does make the game feel somewhat less enjoyable if played on the standard PS5 afterwards.

It’s the same with No Man’s Sky, a game that has progressed dramatically over the years and is now in excellent shape on all platforms. On the PS5 Pro, though, Hello Games comes pretty close to bridging the gap between a PlayStation and a high-end PC for the first time: not only is NMS presented on the Pro at a solid 4K/60 FPS by leveraging Sony’s AI-assisted upscaling algorithm, PSSR, but it also offers a number of advanced lighting effects that greatly improve how the game looks. Given the vast variety of biomes and environments on offer, it’s safe to say that No Man’s Sky players will be among those enjoying the extra power of the PS5 Pro the most.

Several PS5 Pro launch titles are clearly better than their PS5 counterparts in terms of visuals, but they do not improve enough on the entertainment experience on offer as a whole.

Another game that leverages the features offered by the PS5 Pro in order to substantially improve its presentation is F1 2024. Yours truly played it on the Pro for the first time, immensely enjoying the 4K/60 FPS presentation complete with raytraced reflections, global illumination and a few other lighting effects that push this title towards photorealism on occasion. In this graphics preset there’s no “targeting 60 FPS”: it’s 60 FPS all the time, using PSSR in order to take the base 1440 resolution to 4K. What’s more, the 120 FPS option actually delivers on that promise – unlike most PS5 games to date – delivering an exhilarating driving experience in a convincingly rendered virtual environment.

Going back to play F1 2024 on the standard PS5… let’s just say there can be no fair comparison between the two. Not only is the 4K/60 FPS option not as rich or impressive as on the Pro – it often seems soft in terms of definition and flat in terms of color – but the 120 FPS experience is nowhere near as smooth or satisfying.

The one game, though, yours truly enjoyed the most on the PS5 Pro was Horizon: Forbidden West. This is hands-down the most spectacular upgrade for Sony’s new system from a visual standpoint and, right now, one of the most amazing-looking games on any home entertainment system. Not only is it presented at a rock-solid 4K/60 FPS, but there is an almost unbelievable amount of detail added to everything displayed, along with lighting effects to die for. Fun fact: Guerilla’s title does all of that without resorting to Sony’s PSSR upscaling algorithm, once again a testament to how wide a range of options developers have at their disposal in terms of leveraging the features of the PS5 Pro.

PS5 Pro Game Boost: the mixed-bag scenario

The PS5 Pro Enhanced games are a clear-cut case: developers will either work to release patches for past PS5 titles to make them run better on the new PlayStation or they won’t – and publishers will decide to invest the necessary resources to make sure their future games will earn the PS5 Pro Enhanced label or they won’t. One can easily imagine that, if it were up to Sony, all PS5 games would earn that label… but that is obviously not how things work in this industry. The harsh reality is that many past PS5 games may never get a PS5 Pro patch, especially if they did not do all that well commercially and, let’s face it, even if they actually did.

This is where Sony’s Game Boost function comes in. This is build into the operating system of the PS5 Pro itself and essentially allows current PS5 games – which not designed to take advantage of the advanced hardware of the new PlayStation – to at least access the extra processing power of its GPU so that they can perform better based on that. Consumers don’t have to do anything: they run their games on the PS5 Pro as they normally would on a standard PS5 and Game Boost should – in theory – help those unpatched games run at higher frame rates or at higher base resolutions or, ideally, both.

This is where it gets complicated because (a) different kinds of games are programmed in different ways and (b) different games leverage the CPU and the GPU of a PlayStation5 differently depending on what their core gameplay dictates. The PS5 Pro sports the same CPU the standard PS5 does – the former can give a clock boost of 10% to the CPU at the slight expense of the GPU clock, but that’s it – so any PlayStation5 game that heavily depends on the CPU will not see much of an improvement on the Pro because of this obvious constraint.

Sony’s Game Boost feature can indeed help past PS5 titles perform better on the PS5 Pro, but there is no discernible pattern here: it’s a per-case kind of thing.

Then there are the kinds of games that are locked to specific frame rates and programmed pretty much around that lock, so those are also unlikely to benefit from Game Boost. Other games using dynamic resolution scaling (increasing and reducing the number of pixels they create so as to stick to a specific frame rate zone) which could take advantage of Game Boost in order to raise their base resolution, but it’s not a given. Yet, clearly, there are several other games that can indeed run at higher frame rates or stabilize their already decent frame rates based on the extra processing units and the increased system memory bandwidth of the PS5 Pro alone.

Yours truly started testing several non-PS5 Pro Enhanced PS5 games with all of that in mind and wrapped things up after two days without having definitive answers to show for it. He used a handful of titles he’s played extensively over the past two years or so as a point of reference – such as Returnal, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, Cygni and the PS5 version of Minecraft – and it all seems to be happening on a case per case basis. There is simply no discernible pattern. Some games run a bit smoother, some run at a somewhat higher resolution and their graphics seem a bit sharper, while others did not seem impressed by the PS5 Pro’s improved GPU at all.

Long story short: it all depends, really. There is no way to tell for sure how any current non-PS5 Pro Enhanced game will behave when running on the new PlayStation, no matter how new or old, no matter how simple or complicated it might be. So it’s pretty much left to the consumer to try and find out how his/her favorite current PS5 games perform on the PS5 Pro before making a purchase decision. This is precisely why Sony would love to have its publishing partners take a look at their past releases and put together patches that make those games at least PS5 Pro-aware, if not PS5 Pro Enhanced. It will be interesting to see how that goes over time.

PS5 Pro for PS4 games and PS5 games at 8K: the no-case scenario

It’s fair to say that 9 our of 10 people thinking of buying a PS5 Pro would do so in order to improve their gaming experience with PS5 games in 4K, but there are two other cases that Sony’s latest strives to offer more: playing PS4 games or playing games in 8K. Yours truly spent a few hours testing the PS5 Pro in that context too and his findings about either case are the same: consumers should consider them more of a bonus than anything else, not valid reasons to get a PS5 Pro (at least at this point in time).

Regarding PS4 games, Sony was extremely careful with its wording about how this works on the PS5 Pro and, as it turns out, for good reason: managing expectations is key here. There’s an option in the Video Output area of the Screen and Video settings of the system called “Enhance Image Quality for PS4 Games” which can be toggled on or off. Turning it on supposedly activates some kind of extra processing, based on the PS5 Pro’s machine learning subsystem, that can improve the visuals of “select PS4 titles” as Sony puts it.

This option does not necessarily work as its wording implies, though. Yours truly tried around a dozen PS4 games whose overall look he’s familiar with, from Resogun, Knack 2, Minecraft Dungeons and Bloodborne to Soul Calibur VI, Cuphead, Tetris Effect and Tekken 7… and he freely admits of being confused. There was either no change to be found in the actual game graphics (elements such as timers and health bars looked crisper but not the 3D graphics themselves) or there was an apparent attempt at increasing the game’s resolution along with some sharpening (in some cases oversharpening) that actually made certain titles look worse as a result.

To be perfectly honest, it’s not entirely clear to yours truly what’s happening with this “Enhance Image Quality for PS4 Games” option. It works like a post-processing effect or an Instagram filter, of sorts, but it does so indiscriminately, as if the AI algorithm does not really understand what it is supposed to improved and how. Since this is definitely based on the machine learning block inside the PS5 Pro’s processor, there’s always a chance that – by updating the software driving this function – Sony will be able to do more with it. As it stands, though, it feels as if it’s a work in progress, not a true PS5 Pro competitive advantage.

The fact that a consumer product like a PlayStation can actually run games in 8K at all is extremely impressive – but also kind of pointless, at least for the time being.

When it comes to playing PS5 games in 8K there are two different issues worth looking into: the obvious one of performance and a specific one inherent to 8K resolution gaming itself. Yours truly only had two titles at hand capable of running at 8K before the launch of the PS5 Pro: F1 2024 and No Man’s Sky, both of which were patched well in advance in order to offer an 8K graphics mode (Gran Turismo 7 is coming at a later date). F1 2024 is targeting 60 FPS at 8K and – amazingly enough for a machine costing no more than $700 – it does seem to deliver that frame rate consistently. But it does so by sacrificing not just the use of raytracing (one of the most impressive aspects of the game in 4K) but a fair amount of environmental detail too, which makes it look more like a last-gen game than a current-gen one.

No Man’s Sky, on the other hand, looks brilliant in 8K because its visual style does not go for realism as hard as F1 2024 does. Τhis title is targeting 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS – understandable given its open environments – and people sitting close enough to their hopefully large 8K TVs will appreciate the level of detail that 33 million pixels can bring to a game world. It’s one of the most interesting pieces of 8K content available right now and, for the first time ever, it doesn’t take a $5000 PC to enjoy it: the fact that an off-the-shelf consumer product like a PlayStation can actually run 8K games at all is extremely impressive, let alone a title like No Man’s Sky.

This does come at a cost, obviously, as ultra high-resolution graphics in video games – upscaled or not – just can’t hit highly playable framerates without making concessions in visual fidelity right now. Then there’s something else: as both F1 2024 and No Man’s Sky demonstrate, an astounding number of pixels on-screen does not necessarily result in a more visually arresting presentation.

If anything, the razor-sharp lines of 8K-resolution graphics can make all other visual elements on-screen seem mediocre at times: upon seeing those perfect lines the human brain expects to find the same level of detail in everything, be it 3D models, textures, lighting or various effects. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

Truth be told, there’s not a single gaming system in the market today – no matter how expensive – that can deliver all of the above at maximum settings, in 8K, at highly playable framerates. So, for the foreseeable future, it makes way more sense for developers and publishers to go down a different road: utilize the extra power of the PS5 Pro in order to make richer in detail, more immediately impressive games e.g. in 1080p/1440p and then leverage PSSR in order to hit acceptable framerates in 4K, rather than go for maximum resolution but make too many sacrifices in other areas of a game.

It is for that reason – along with the fact that there’s just not a high enough numbers of PS5 gamers playing on an 8K TV set – that yours truly would not expect a lot of future PS5 games to offer an 8K graphics mode. Unless, of course, their visual style calls for it and ultra-high-res graphics are a good fit for that.

The PS5 Pro can indeed deliver, but does it right now – especially for the price?

So, after taking all of the above into account: is the PS5 Pro worth spending $700 for? For that, The Point Online will have to direct consumers to the full review of this new PlayStation, where this question – and a number of others – are answered in full and in context.

After all, let’s face it: Sony’s latest gaming console is launching in a vacuum: there is the kind of value it can deliver right now, the value it can deliver in the future and, obviously, that price point to consider. It wouldn’t do to just recommend the PS5 Pro to its target audience and leave it at that, would it?