PS5 Pro: the user experience

It’s fair to say that just by taking a look at the specs of the PS5 Pro, Sony’s most powerful PlayStation to date, one can easily tell that the main drive behind this particular product (if not its sole focus) has been its performance in PS5 games, both in image quality and frames-per-second terms.

The user experience of such a product still matters, though, because – regardless of whether its prospective owners already play on a PS5 on not – at the tail end of 2024 one expects a new, advanced PlayStation to be (a) easy to set up and include in a home network, (b) highly configurable and (c) trouble-free in operation, even after many hours of use at a time.

The good news? The PlayStation5 Pro is all of those things. The bad news? It hardly brings anything new to the table in terms of added functionality as a modern digital entertainment system. As a result, that much-discussed $700 price tag will have to be justified by gaming performance alone. Sony seems to not worry about that – since it was demanding gamers this product was specifically designed for in the first place – but it would have been nice to see a Pro console that’s shipping without an optical disc drive offer something unique in return.

So what it’s like to set up and use the PS5 Pro? Here’s what yours truly found out.

Easy setup, trouble-free operation, everything as expected

In terms of user experience this new powerful PlayStation is pretty much in line with what owners of the current PS5 are already familiar with. Setting it up is as fast and easy as anyone can ask for: configuring a “blank slate” system takes literally less than 10 minutes (even including the first firmware update), which is what new PS5 owners will certainly appreciate. People already owning a PS5 can always setup the Pro as a new device and re-download everything or do a full backup to an external storage device and then restore to the new model.

Yours truly went for a full system transfer via a network connection this time around – lots of things to do for the PS5 Pro coverage, unusually tight deadlines, anything to avoid long download times – so he hooked up the PS5 Pro along with his previous PS5 on the same Gigabit Ethernet router. The whole thing went smoothly, moving across almost 1 TB of data and building a new PlayStation system ready for testing in about an hour. Now that is something no gaming PC based on Windows can do.

Using the PS5 Pro after setting it up is no different than with any other PS5 model. The system boots up in a few seconds (the Pro does not feel any quicker in that regard compared to the Slim) and consumers are presented with the same clean user interface. The new model does not seem to be any faster or slower in general operation either, despite the fact that it sports more storage – SSDs of the same line offer better speeds at higher capacities on PC, but that does not seem to be the case here – as well as an additional 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

Truth is, the PS5 Pro did feel a bit faster while getting in and out of different games sometimes, but not in a consistent or truly impressive way. Chances are that the extra RAM is only utilized when PS5 games ask for all the memory they can get out of the original 16GB GDDR6 pool, but yours truly reserves judgement on that until he’s had more time to experiment with more games striving to push the PS5 Pro to the limit.

8K display support, peripheral compatibility, the proof is in the games

What’s more interesting to see this time around is proper support for HDR and 8K displays. Yours truly tested Sony’s latest PlayStation using a 27-inch 4K Sony InZone M9 monitor, a 98-inch 4K Sony X90L TV and an 85-inch 8K Samsung QN900A TV. Each time the PS5 Pro was connected to each one of them an HDR re-calibration was required because of each display’s different characteristics – which may sound somewhat annoying, but is the correct way of adjusting any display for modern PS5 games. In the vast majority of situations, this procedure works well.

The 8K option only shows up in Settings when the PS5 Pro is connected to an 8K-capable screen, which makes sense, but the user interface itself remains at 4K – which is also to be expected and, to be honest, it’s just as well. The full 8K resolution is only used by games offering such an option – such as F1 2024 and No Man’s Sky at the time of publication – and consumers are able to capture 8K screenshots normally (captured video is unfortunately still capped at 4K).

Yours truly was also happy to see that people planning on upgrading from a PS5 Slim to a PS5 Pro will have no trouble using their existing peripherals with the new model. Owners of the disc-based PS5 Slim, for instance, can just detach the optical disc drive from their current machine and attach it to the Pro without any issues whatsoever: the drive unit matches the new PlayStation perfectly and it will only be a matter of a minute or so to re-register the drive itself with the PS5 Pro upon first boot.

Furthermore, people who have installed M.2 SSD drives in the expansion slot of the PS5 Slim or the OG PS5 can just take that out and put it the PS5 Pro’s expansion slot in the same way. Upon first boot the new PlayStation will warn its new owner in case there are any games present in the M.2 SSD that already exist in the onboard storage of the Pro, it will offer to delete them from the M.2 SSD, it will rebuild the system’s database and then all other games stored there will work normally (provided they are registered to the same PSN account).

During the last 6 days of testing The Point Online had at its disposal for the coverage of the PS5 Pro, Sony’s new system was absolutely stable, remarkably cool and admirably quiet. Yours truly couldn’t tell whether the device was on or not on occasion (which was not the case with the OG PS5). It’s a testament to how far manufacturing processes and cooling systems have come over the last 4 years, as well as to how well-built the PS5 Pro is. Sony deserves credit for that, regardless of how long it took the company to put this product together.

While the user experience offered by the PS5 Pro is a high-quality one, it’s clear that this particular system’s success will depend on how – and by how much – it can improve the types of PS5 games demanding consumers care about. The findings of our testing regarding this deserve a lengthy article of their own, though, which will be published tomorrow, before our review of the PS5 Pro goes live. They should be interesting, no?