Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro Is an Overpriced, Superficial Upgrade

When it was first announced in September, the PlayStation 5 Pro (out Nov. 7) left many people scratching their heads. Modern consumers are no stranger to frequent hardware refreshes throughout the life cycle of the tech they buy — Apple taught people long ago that whatever iPhone model you have will immediately be followed by an “S” or “Pro” upgrade.

Gaming’s no different. Since the Game Boy, players have yearned for incremental updates to the same product: a smaller frame, a color screen, back lighting — all just to play the exact same games.

But as refresh cycles have become the norm, so has the general acceptance of getting less for more. As laptops shifted from disc drives to internal storage, people found they were paying the same (sometimes more) for the same product with fewer hardware features. Then fewer ports. But the promise came with more streamlined software and modernized features.

The PlayStation 5 Pro doesn’t bother with any of that. It’s an exercise in providing less, for more, and what it does provide will only appeal to a very select group of people. It also costs $700 — $200 or more than the existing PS5 models.

What’s new about the PS5 Pro?

On the outside, the PS5 Pro looks very similar to the original chunky PlayStation 5, released in 2020, but with a shark fin-like stripe down the middle that resembles the modular shell of last year’s PS5 “Slim,” the first hardware refresh of Sony’s console. While the Slim (an unofficial name) is simply a smaller version of the OG PS5 with the same capabilities, the Pro has upgraded hardware that impacts its performance.

Key among the changes is an upgraded GPU that, teraflops and technical jargon aside, essentially makes the console’s computing speed much faster (45 percent by Sony’s estimates). What does that do, exactly? It means that games are rendered more quickly, making them run more smoothly, with textures popping in less noticeably, and moment-to-moment play being less janky when a lot of things are happening at once.

There’s also “advanced” ray tracing, a big buzz word for the last few years in the industry. Ray tracing is basically a tool that allows for natural lighting in the game world, with realistic reflections on surfaces like glass and water, and heavy refraction. It’s something many people may not really notice, especially when games aren’t running at higher resolutions, but it’s what puts a lot of the wow factor into today’s prettiest releases.

Lastly, there’s AI (of course). In this instance, it comes in the form of “AI-driven upscaling,” a feature officially titled PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR). It’s a mouthful of a name, but it does heavily impact the overall appeal of the PS5 Pro, by allowing games to conserve processing power by being rendered at a lower resolution, then upscaled using AI to look better. In short, it lets games that used to look good but perform poorly now perform and look better.

Combined, these three features are the entirety of what PlayStation 5 Pro has to offer: making the games you already own or intend to buy look and feel a little better than they will on a base PS5.

Does the PS5 Pro live up to the promise?

It does, with caveats. The ultimate selling point of the Pro is that it delivers on the technology promised by the original PS5. That console was expected to make the leap into 4K resolution gaming, with ray tracing and smooth frame rates. And it did, to a degree.

As a simple rule of thumb, games should be running at a certain frame rate to look good. 30 frames per second (fps for short) is acceptable and is the baseline for modern titles, and 60fps is the ideal when things begin to look extremely smooth with less jittery action or forced motion blur to fill in the gaps. On the high end, there’s 120fps and more, but that’s a performance level only expected for super expensive PCs.

Using a base PS5, players usually get the option to open a game’s menu and select how they’d like it to run visually, which boils down to some version of a choice between “Quality” or “Performance” mode. For Quality, that usually means running at 4K resolution and 30fps; Performance is 1080p or higher, sometimes 1440p (2K), and a smoother 60fps. Those, of course, are all targets that a game can fail to meet.

What the PS5 Pro offers is an upgraded version of this choice, in many cases literally called “Quality Pro” or “Performance Pro,” options that only become available after a software update to existing games — which Sony says will be over 50 titles around launch. While some games simply omit the previous options for the Pro versions, others still offer the full spectrum, running 5 to 6 options from basic Performance all the way to Quality Pro.

So, it’s really just a sliding scale. Quality Pro now targets 30fps at high 4K resolution with the full power of ray tracing; Performance Pro targets 60fps but uses that fancy AI-driven PSSR to upscale the resolution from 1440p or lower to an artificial 4K. It’s the same bargain as the PS5, one looks better and runs worse, one runs well and looks okay. Except now, the baseline Performance mode is how players probably hoped their original PS5 had looked like out of the box.

Like the PS5, the Pro also upgrades the performance of PlayStation 4 games, although the ceiling for how much better those games will perform has already been capped.

Rolling Stone tested over 20 games with the Pro, including Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part I, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, God of War: Ragnarök, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Stellar Blade, and Dragon’s Dogma 2. The majority of the PS5 games tested already had been patched to take advantage of the updates, although the ones that didn’t, like Star Wars Outlaws, sure felt like they ran better.

But perhaps that’s a placebo.

Who is the PS5 Pro for?

The real question isn’t whether the PS5 Pro does what it advertises, because the short answer is that it does. Games look and play better on the upgraded console. The real question is whether you’re the type of player that cares.

It’s been a talking point for years, but the generational leap in gaming technology has pretty much ground to a halt in the last decade. Think of the 11-year gap between Super Mario Bros. (1985) and Super Mario 64 (1996). It was earth shattering. From 8-bit pixel art to fully realized 3D worlds. In the same window, from 2013 to 2024, we’ve gone from a gorgeous game like The Last of Us to a slightly prettier version of the same game.

As the visual fidelity of games approaches hyper realism, the differences become less noticeable to the casual eye. And while tech heads and hardcore gamers may see or feel the difference (I do), it simply doesn’t feel like enough.

Take, for instance, the upgraded resolution and frame rate options. Anyone who’s dropped a bunch of money on a modern television or monitor with an HDMI 2.1 port has had the option of utilizing a mode called Variable Refresh Rate (VRR). What this does is up the refresh rate of the image to 120hz (from about 60hz standard), making games look smoother in motion. Sometimes, it also allows for an unlocked frame rate, meaning that even in Quality mode, certain games could approach the higher frame rates promised by Performance. Not everyone has this, but if you do, you’ve already been living with what the PS5 Pro has to offer.

Flipping back and forth between different visual modes to spot the differences can be headache inducing, especially when the changes feel so superficial. But it’s not just the superficiality of what’s offered that’s the issue, it’s what’s being asked for it. The base price for the PlayStation 5 Pro is $699.99, but that doesn’t even come with a disc drive — which is now sold separately for an additional $80. So, to upgrade the internal hardware of your existing PS5 and match its overall capabilities with Blu-rays, it would be around $780 (pre-tax). That’s $280 more than the base PS5 with a disc-drive is now.

For the tech-obsessed, hardcore gamer, the PlayStation 5 Pro might be exactly what they’re hoping for. And if they have the expendable income, great. For everyone else, the PlayStation 5 Pro doesn’t do anything new beyond what is likely to be seen as an incremental, potentially unnoticeable difference in picture quality and feel, all at a premium.

Had Sony dropped the price of the base PS5 and made the Pro the better offer at the current entry point, it would be a success. But given the cyclical trends of the industry, we’re likely only a few short years away from the PlayStation 6, anyway. Might as well wait.