This is the playstation Five Pro an upgrade to Sony's
flagship console that enables higher graphical fidelity and improved ray
tracing at much higher and smoother frame rates. It's
the most powerful gaming console on the market, but
it's also the most expensive. I'm going to break
down everything new and exciting here and tell you if
it's worth buying or upgrading to the original playstation five
launched in November of 20 20. Kicking off the
current generation of gaming consoles. Three years later came
2020 three's slim model. The performance didn't change but
Sony did slightly increase the storage and introduce us to
the external attachable disk drive. Now, a year
later, we get the first real step forward in
the console gaming space with the playstation five pro,
an upgraded console in power and performance. The PS
Five Pro takes a lot of design cues from last
year's slim model. It has the same four panel
design, but unfortunately, the panels are ever so
slightly different in size. This means if you bought
any of playstation's nice color panels to customize your device
, they won't fit on the new one. It
also uses the exact same external disk drive. Unlike
the last two PS five models, the only one
version of the pro, the digital only option in
previous models, you could spend 50 to$100 more
for a console that would read discs. Now,
if you want your new PS Five Pro to have
that functionality, you need the$80 disk drive released
last year. However, if you have a slim
model and have been using an external disk drive,
that same drive will work on your new machine.
The playstation Five Pro also gets a bit bigger in
size sitting between the original and slim models. And
now it has these racing stripe like fins on the
side that do vent a bit of the air like
the slim, it has two USB C ports on
the front and two standard USB ports on the back
. It can also be positioned horizontally or vertically.
It comes with two little plastic feet to lay it
flat, but also like the slim. If you
want to stand it up, right, you'll need
to purchase that$30 stand separately. You can still
install your own SSD. But Sony has doubled the
internal storage to two terabytes this time around. It
also now supports Wi Fi seven. There are three
main features that power the playstation Five Pro. The
first is the upgraded GP U playstation states. It
includes 67% more compute units and 28% faster memory compared
to a standard PS five, these enable it to
render game play 45% faster. The second feature is
advanced ray tracing that allows games to utilize more dynamic
reflections and realistic lighting playstation states that it can now
cast rays at double and sometimes triple the speed of
the current PS five. And we'll get into this
more later when we talk about the performance hit the
games take. Now when utilizing these, the last
key feature is A I upscaling that Sony calls playstation
spectral super resolution. This is a machine learning based
technology that provides higher image clarity. Now, let's
talk about what these mean in practice on the standard
PS five, you usually had two options to choose
from when it came to the game's visuals performance mode
which would lower the resolution often to around 1080 P
. While boosting the frame rate usually targeting 60 frames
per second. This allowed games to run more smoothly
and would often result in less dense environments and textures
. The other option is resolution sometimes called fidelity or
graphics mode which raises the resolution to around four K
while capping the frame rate at 30. Thanks to
the pro's increased power games that have received an update
can now target a full four K resolution while still
reaching 60 frames per second. Your games will look
better areas will be more detailed and the game will
still run as smoothly as possible without the trade off
. However, this doesn't eliminate the two graphics options
. In fact, all the games I tested still
feature a pro performance and pro resolution option for several
of these games. The PS five Pro is able
to increase further than just four K 60 with some
games like E A sports F 124 advertising eight K
or 100 and 20 frames per second. One quick
caveat is that I don't have an eight K TV
and my capture device caps out at four K 60
. So I was unable to test and show those
off in Horizon Zero dawn remastered. We can easily
see the increased resolution in the environments and textures.
There's also denser foliage compared to the standard PS Five's
performance mode on PS five pro, both pro modes
look very similar. But when slowed down, we
can see how much smoother the pro favors performance mode
is while having extremely similar graphical detail. In Spiderman
two, we see a higher density to N PC
shadows between both fidelity modes compared to their performance counterparts
. We also see a much higher density to traffic
in N PC population on the pro model compared to
the standard one. And of course, the higher
frame rate is present really making Spidey's web swinging look
and feel its best ratchet. And clank also features
both modes with the performance pro option targeting 60 frames
per second while keeping the resolution high, the fidelity
mode lowers the frame 8 to 30 again, but
adds in various ray tracing effects. Instead, the
pro provides a pretty large boost in artifact clean up
and texture density. When we look at this close
up of rivet, we see this again in this
close up of ratchet where the baseline PS Five's facial
textures almost look matted compared to the pros. And
when we look at scenes with a lot of distance
, we see areas further away remain in focus as
well as more particles being introduced, such as the
confetti in this scene or the crowds here E A
Sports F 124 is another good example of how much
more detail we see in the scenes on the new
pro. The racetrack texture has far more detail,
especially in the quality mode on pro. We also
see more text in focus when looking at background elements
when comparing either console's quality modes against performance. While
we are seeing modest improvements to a number of games
, the downside is that you won't get this across
the board for everything. Simply loading up any game
on the PS Five Pro doesn't guarantee that you'll see
a bump in performance. It's reliant on the developers
to go back and patch in the enhancements. For
example, Final Fantasy Seven rebirth, a game I
saw a PS Five Pro demo of last month had
a fantastic looking update in performance mode. That game
looked almost fuzzy with how much it had to lower
the resolution. Unfortunately, that patch wasn't available for
me to capture when putting this review together at launch
playstation states, it have around 50 titles upgraded and
running better on the pro. Of course, there
will be more support going forward. But this is
just something to keep in mind if you're thinking of
getting a pro on day one, I'm personally hoping
that Final Fantasy 16 and Ghost of Tsushima, which
are not on that list, get updates in the
future since I never got around to their DLC.
And this would be the perfect excuse to load them
up again. And it is a little disappointing that
we have no new first party titles coming out around
this launch to really get excited about. However,
we can look at even older games for another new
feature for the PS Five Pro, the ability to
enhance image quality for PS four games. This is
found in the screen and video settings and must be
toggled on doing so will enable a system wide image
quality boost for quote some games. I'm unsure what
the full list of supported PS titles are, but
I took a look at 2018 Spiderman. This is
a really nice edition for anyone with a backlog of
PS four games. It's something we saw Xbox do
with some of its backwards compatibility efforts and it's nice
to see playstation joining in the Playstation five Pro retails
for$700. But remember if you want to stand
it upright and have it red disks, you'll have
to shell out another 30$80 respectively. This makes
it the most expensive console we've seen hit retail,
but I wouldn't say it's overpriced when it comes down
to my purchasing recommendation. It really depends on whether
or not you already have a PS five, the
standard PS five without a disk drive retails for 450
increasing your storage, another one terabyte will probably cost
around$100. So it really comes down to the
graphics upgrade being worth 100 and 50 bucks. But
with Black Friday right around the corner, there's a
good chance the base PS five will see some discounts
. I highly doubt the pro will. I personally
do think the upgrade is worth the price since you'll
also be future proofing yourself for the next handful of
years. Anyone buying a PS Five Pro is basically
guaranteeing they'll be able to play the next decade of
playstation games comfortably. Even if we saw a PS
six in around four years time, the install base
on PS five is far too high for them to
abandon it. And we still see that now with
titles like Call of Duty Black Ops six still launching
on last GEN consoles like the PS four last month
. If you already have a PS five, then
I think you're better off saving your money and not
getting the new machine. Even while I was putting
this review together, I was still surprised just how
well the base model was keeping up with the pro
in a lot of cases. But if you can
find a good trade in deal or you're thinking of
getting your first PS five, then I definitely think
the pro is worth it. But I'm curious what
you guys think. Are you happy with your base
playstation five or does the pro seem like a good
upgrade? Let me know in the comments and thanks
for watching.