PlayStation 5 Pro Review: Proving How Good the PS5 Already Was

It’s difficult to say where the $700 PlayStation 5 Pro—Sony’s supercharged, ultra-expensive console—fits in a world where Sony has sold nearly enough PS5s to equal the population of France. Is the Pro a less expensive gaming alternative to a PC? Is it an upgrade for today’s PS5 users? Or is it some unexpected pinnacle of console gaming perfection that should be the envy of any modern gamer? Our PlayStation 5 Pro review is here to answer these big questions.

As to the first: no. That’s fine, because a console shouldn’t be a PC. The second question depends on how much you value graphical subtleties and higher framerates. Instead, it’s better to think of the PS5 Pro as the best way to experience what the $500 PlayStation 5 already offers. Most games currently sporting the “Enhanced” label can run at better framerates even with additional ray tracing effects. Some games benefit more than others.

But the PS5 Pro is still better. How much that $200 difference in price means will be up to the individual, but I can say the average PS5 gamer is not losing out on anything truly significant by not going for the Pro. You get a total of 2 TB of SSD storage, compared to the slim model’s 1 TB, which is a solid upgrade. However, if you have lots of game discs, you’ll have to buy an additional $80 disc drive that doesn’t come in the box. Really, if you’re a PlayStation devotee, this $700 console is a $780 device.

If money is no object, then of course the PS5 Pro is the better console. The performance boost in some games like God of War: Ragnarök is significant for those who care about it. It’s just that, unlike the PS4 Pro to PS4, the new Pro model doesn’t set its older, less capable brother in another class. The PlayStation 5 Pro includes an enhanced GPU with a built-in AI upscaler that helps more games support better framerates. I’ve played and finished those games on the PlayStation 5, and I don’t think the graphical improvements change the experience enough to necessitate playing them again.

There’s some gravy to savor before Thanksgiving. Now that the PS5 Pro exists, the slim model PS5 is going to be cheaper on eBay or with resellers. It’s already on sale before Black Friday. You’ll be happy with the PS5 Pro, especially if you demand the best in-game graphics this side of the console/PC divide. You’ll also be happy with the regular PlayStation 5, especially if you can get it for cheaper than normal price.

PlayStation 5 Pro Review: Design

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

The PlayStation 5 has always looked distinct, especially with its extended whale fin covers. Before the slim model hit the scene, the PS5 was overly large, especially with the built-in disc drive. The slim model scaled things back significantly in both length and height; the new PS5 Pro is nearly the height of the original console.

I’ve come to admire the design of the PS5 and PS5 Pro. With the additional slits running through the center, you could imagine the console as a white shark. It’s a quiet sea beast, at that. Without the disc drive whirring, the console’s fans issue a quiet whisper that’s inaudible above the sound of the television.

Setup for the Pro is as simple as the regular PS5. Most modern televisions will recognize when you plug your PS5 in, and they should configure the correct HDR settings. Perhaps it’s just familiarity, but I enjoy the PS5’s menus for accessing all your installed games, especially for quickly accessing your trophies.

The lack of disc drive is a stark reminder of the PS5 Pro’s high price tag. Our review unit didn’t come with one, but luckily we had our PS5 Slim model handy. After some surgery, we attached it to the new model. Even that is not enough. You’re required to register the disc drive on the new console, which of course requires an internet connection. Our office went through a period of spotty internet during review, and it took multiple tries to register our drive.

It’s too much extra effort just to play the physical versions of the games you ostensibly own. Sony’s unwillingness to let modders or third-party designers craft their own drives makes paying the $80 for a separate drive sting even more. As Digital Foundry pointed out, the lack of a disc drive also forces gamers to pay higher prices for new or older titles through the PlayStation Store, rather than finding physical discs for less through third-party shops or eBay. It’s a predatory move that we hope Sony doesn’t continue in the future.

Considering what’s lacking compared to a regular PlayStation 5, it’s interesting how nothing in the game, the menus, or even the TV’s input recognizes the $700 console as a PS5 Pro. Occasionally, some games will refer to the “Pro Enhanced” graphics in their setting menus. Without that, there would be nothing during use to tell you you’re using a more expensive device.

PlayStation 5 Pro Review: Available Games

© Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

Sony said that there were 55 games bearing enhanced editions at the PS5 Pro launch. By the end of November, Sony’s store page has effectively confirmed there will be more than 100 games with enhanced graphics within the next few months, including future titles like Kingdom Come Deliverance II. There are over 700 games currently available on PS5, but at least Sony attracted some of the big ones to the initial list. There is God of War: Ragnarök, Baldur’s Gate III, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and more big name games.

What you won’t find on the list are recent games like Astro Bot. I doubt the simple platformer needed an enhanced version, but it’s one of the few PlayStation exclusives to arrive on PS5 in 2024, so it’s odd to find it missing. The PlayStation 5 Pro’s big enhancements include better ray tracing capabilities in some games while targeting higher framerates. There’s also PlayStation Super Resolution, or PSSR, which you’ll see in games settings for better anti-aliasing and improving framerates. Despite all this, you may open up your “Enhanced” game only to find the same graphical options you did before. Now, they look and play differently with those same options.

The question is, even when they don’t sport an “Enhanced” logo, do games benefit from the PS5 Pro hardware? The answer is yes, though how much depends on the game you’re running. Elden Ring does run better on Quality mode on PS5 Pro by around 10 FPS, but it doesn’t quite hit 60 FPS. I would be surprised if FromSoftware’s latest title doesn’t get the enhanced treatment before the end of 2025. What about other games that will likely never get Sony’s special sauce?

I tested it with my PS5 version of Deathloop. The game is normally locked at 60 FPS under the default “Performance” mode. The “Ray Tracing” mode on PS5 Pro still makes the game run slower, even though I experienced less hitching in regular gameplay than I did playing it on the original PS5.

As for the games that benefit the most from the Pro upgrade, Sony pointed to The Last of Us Part II: Remastered. The game is making use of AI upscaling and the enhanced graphics capabilities to do 60 FPS at 4K without losing anything in visual fidelity. I played the game when it first launched on PS4, and the upgrade to PS5 was already a big jump in graphical fidelity.

We’ll wait and see if more games see big improvement on the Pro versus the PS5. Just don’t expect any games to claim resolutions beyond 4K. Sony did away with all the “8K” labeling on its boxes earlier this year. The new Ps5 Pro box proclaims it will do 4K at 120 Hz with HDR, same as the regular PS5. At least we can stop pretending anybody is going out of their way to buy an 8K TV.

PlayStation 5 Pro Review: PS4 Games on PS5 Pro

There are additional settings to enhance the image quality of PlayStation 4 games as well, though Sony turns this off by default. You have to go into Settings, scroll to the Screen and Video menu, and toggle it on to get better image quality. The console makes it clear this will only work “in some games.” Sony doesn’t say exactly which titles benefit most. In our tests there’s only very minor improvement in quality compared to what you would get on regular PS5.

I tried it with a few PS4 games, and unless I put the screen right in front of my face, I couldn’t spot a difference. Jumping back and forth between Pro and non-Pro PS5 with The Last Guardian and the PS4 version of Titanfall 2, I couldn’t spot any major difference. Edges did seem sharper on the new console, but the difference is minuscule. Sony mentioned that the “Enhance Image Quality” setting may also result in some graphical glitches, though I didn’t experience any with the few games I tested.

PlayStation 5 Pro Review: Performance

© Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

If you own a ton of PS5 games already, you’ll discover there’s a big difference in how much performance you get depending on the game. Sony didn’t touch the PS5’s CPU capabilities and instead focused all its effort on improving GPU performance. A GPU-dependent title will benefit more than others. Many games, even the enhanced titles, look near-equivalent to their PS5 counterparts. The most significant upgrade is merely the higher framerates you’ll get thanks to the improved hardware.

In God of War: Ragnarök, the FPS bump is immediately apparent if you jump from PS5 to PS5 Pro. The game feels silky smooth, akin to what you get when playing on a capable PC. The PSSR combined with the new hardware was equaling upwards of 80 uncapped FPS in some areas, though dropping to 70 FPS when there’s more action on screen. The game looked incredible on a regular PS5 already, helped by the fact it was tuned to Sony’s hardware from the get-go. It doesn’t feel radically different, but anybody who values the feel of playing above 60 FPS will be more than satisfied.

The fun thing for reviewers is that we can actually turn off PSSR and return to the base PS5’s Temporal Anti-Aliasing to see what kind of performance gains the upscaling has on PS5 Pro. Without PSSR anti-aliasing, there was a bump of 10 to 15 FPS in the scenes I played. Whether you prefer TAA’s higher framerates or PSSR’s look is up to you, but I would stick with all the default settings.

In Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, the game doesn’t have any special options for PS5 Pro, though you can feel the difference with the capped 60 FPS under Quality mode graphics. It’s not like a higher FPS would make hitting those tight parry windows easier, but the game simply feels smoother. On a regular PS5, Jedi Survivor’s “Performance” mode looks jagged and awful by comparison. Our Jedi hero Cal Kestis runs as fast as a headless chicken, and looks the part too. Simply put, Quality mode is the best way to play that game by any standard, and the setting runs better on the Pro.

We tested several other enhanced titles, like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, where the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions looked and played effectively the same. In the first few campaign missions, the game performed 80 to 100 FPS outside of 120 Hz mode. The campaign on normal PS5 is capped at 60 FPS.

I should mention that the framerate here is not nearly as significant in single player as it is in multiplayer, which is why Sony made sure Black Ops was one of the first titles to get the enhanced treatment. It’s a less-choppy experience than the PS5, but in a marginal sense that only the most dedicated players will comprehend. The best experience I had was with Horizon: Forbidden West, a game that looks so good on PS5 Pro it may incentivize players to beat the game.

I’ve played Horizon: Forbidden West on the original PS5 and on PC, all for the sake of benchmarking. If I had to chose any device to play it on, it would be the PS5 Pro. Forbidden West looked great on PS5, but the enhanced edition has several extras that put it over the top. The new “Favor Resolution Pro” mode caps framerates at a stated 30 FPS and limits the TV to 60 Hz refresh rates while the default “Favor Performance Pro” mode uncaps framerates for up to 120 Hz refresh rates. I preferred the latter for its much smoother gameplay, and the difference was so minimal I couldn’t spot it. In this mode, the game hovered back and forth between 58 and 70 FPS.

PlayStation 5 Pro Review: Verdict

© Photo: Adriano Contreras / Gizmodo

The PlayStation 5 Pro is the best console Sony offers right now. There’s no question on that front. The performance gains in some titles are significant, and in some cases they do look better on the new console compared to the old. However, this mid-cycle refresh isn’t a necessary upgrade for any current PS5 owner, especially those who don’t need peak FPS in Call of Duty to feel competitive.

I’ve read a few takes that compare the PS5 Pro to a gaming PC. The performance on the Pro is impressive and marginally better than a base PS5, but, no, this isn’t a competition for PC. Solely from a visuals standpoint, the Pro may be able to compete in like-for-like in some games, but the real drawbacks are customizability. Titles sporting the “Enhanced” label still swap between a bare few graphics options, and in most cases the default option is the best choice. Older games that won’t get any special treatment from Sony, including PS4 and some PS5 games, effectively play as well as they did before.

The big distinction between a gaming PC and the PS5 Pro is price. If I could get a mid-tier gaming rig new-in-box for $700, I would be the luckiest man in the world. Then again, if I spend $800 more for a gaming desktop or laptop, I would also have a PC and have a much wider variety of titles on offer. The PS5 Pro is still just a console, one that is beholden to Sony’s ecosystem.

But it is an upgrade overall. The extra 1 TB of SSD storage saves users from going out and buying extra storage options for upwards of $100, so you could consider the console as packing $100 worth of graphical upgrades. The lack of disc drive sours that sense of dealmaking, but the $700 price tag seems fitting for what you get.

What it also proves is that the regular, slim-model PlayStation 5 is still a quality console. Playing the PS5 Pro, I concluded that I can live without all the extra graphical capabilities.