Exclusive Hands-On: I Played Sony's All-New PS5 Pro

Sitting in front of an 80-inch TV playing Gran Turismo 7 is an immersive experience. It’s even more realistic in 8K resolution. I’m not a good driver, but that’s partly because I’m stunned by the clarity of the vistas in front of me. I’m also wowed by a new 4K ray-tracing mode that casts car reflections on other racers. It feels almost like I’m in VR without the headset.

I’m at Sony’s San Mateo PlayStation headquarters in a room full of TVs, all running demos of familiar games such as Ratchet and Clank and Spider-Man 2. They’re playing on the new PlayStation 5 Pro, arriving Nov. 7 for $700 (£700). Mark Cerny, Sony’s lead PlayStation system architect, guides me around the demos, pointing out the Pro upgrades compared to the standard PS5 on a side-by-side monitor. 

As I jump back and forth, I can see the difference. Everything is crisper, more fluid or both. I’d prefer to play on the PS5 Pro. But with a non-Pro PS5 available for $500 today, and likely less during upcoming holiday sales, I don’t know if the sometimes subtle upgrades will be worth the price for many. The PS5 Pro is not the PlayStation 6, which likely won’t be released for another three or four years, and it isn’t for everyone. It’s a big, graphically boosted piece of hardware that can keep up with ever-changing PCs, and in some ways maybe exceed them.

The PS5 Pro is all about making big TV gaming a happier experience. A souped-up GPU promises more ray-tracing and fluid 4K and 60-frames-per-second gaming across the board for games that get Pro upgraded, and automatic AI upscaling for the rest of the PlayStation library. Oh, and expect a lot more ray-tracing, a fancy graphical technique to simulate light. Expect games to get Pro-upgraded performance extras — Sony says about 40 to 50 games will get patches when the system launches in November.

I played over half a dozen games on the PS5 Pro, and spoke with Cerny and Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Platform Business Group. We talked about what the upgrade means for PlayStation’s gaming future, and what to expect next.

Similar in size with turbo-style vents

I was shocked that the PS5 Pro wasn’t a hulking beast. The console’s contours are nearly the same as the original PS5, and it’s actually smaller. Meanwhile the “Slim” PS5, released last year, is definitely smaller than the Pro but the difference in size isn’t massive.

The biggest external differences, teased in Sony’s 30th anniversary logo, are the diagonal black ribbed vents across the center. (These mean the Pro is incompatible with existing PS5 console covers.) The back also has an extra USB-C port instead of USB-A. But the PS5 Pro should slot into similar shelving to your older PS5, unlike the chunkier PS4 Pro released in 2016, and of course you can mount the Pro vertically on the optional $30 stand if you prefer. 

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The Pro comes with the same DualSense controller as the PS5 — no upgrades there. (A step-up DualSense Edge controller already exists.) The Pro doesn’t have an optical disc drive, though. Instead, there’s a larger 2TB solid state drive, plus the same support for expanded M2 SSDs. You can attach an optical drive separately, though, the same ones that work on the new-design PS5 models. You could detach one of those or buy a new one. Not having an included optical drive standard feels like a statement that downloadable games are now the standard, and the Pro’s bumped-up Wi-Fi 7 support should make for faster downloads if your router supports it.

Gaming perks: Bigger GPU, 4K and 60fps, lots of ray tracing

Everything the PS5 Pro offers is about graphics. The CPU is the same as the PS5, and so is the SSD speed. The GPU, meanwhile, has 67% more computing cores, according to Sony, with 28% faster RAM and 45% faster rendering. 

There are three big initial upgrades Sony is specifically pushing on the Pro for what that new GPU is doing: more ray tracing, automatic AI-assisted game upscaling for 4K and a new Pro mode for games that will combine 60fps and 4K together.

An AI-assisted upscaling mode, called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, works across the whole game library without any needed patch, adding in details to upscale to 4K. I didn’t see this demonstrated, but the feature should help enhance older games if you have a 4K TV. It’ll also work on PSVR 2 games in the future, too, Cerny said.

The planned 40 to 50 games that get PS5 Pro upgrades at the hardware’s Nov. 7 launch will focus on 4K and 60fps upgrades across the board, but also have a laundry list of other graphics boosts including new volumetric lighting and effects, richer graphics, more on-screen background characters, and modes that can ramp up to 120fps or 8K gaming. I played Gran Turismo 7 in an 8K mode and a 4K mode that added all sorts of extra ray-tracing effects. Much like PC games, Cerny said the Pro could spark a range of extra gaming modes.

TVs with variable refresh rates that can range from 40 to 120 fps are going to work with the PS5 Pro, Cerny adds, because games will automatically get frame rate improvements without an upgrade patch. But dedicated 120 fps modes will come too. Cerny said over 25% of PS5 owners own 120 fps-capable TVs, while around 1 in 10 PS5 players have variable refresh rate TVs. Gaming in 8K is a fun extra, but it’s available to an even smaller subset of existing PS5 gamers, since 8K TVs are even less common.

“I’ve already seen games with three different PS5 Pro modes,” Cerny said of the lineup of games upgraded for the launch. “As time goes by, particularly for the games which are launching after the hardware releases, we’ll increasingly see a more nuanced approach, where the focus is less on resolution, and much more about higher image quality through a variety of strategies.”

Cerny said the process of porting over PC games is easier than it was on the PlayStation 4 Pro. He sees the PS5 Pro, much like the PS5 with its ultrafast onboard SSD, as leading the way for future gaming trends.

“PS5 Pro uses the new advanced [ray tracing] feature sets that AMD created as the next step in their roadmap architecture,” Cerny told me. “But if you look around, there are no other AMD GPUs that use it yet. We motivated the development, and I’m very happy we did so — the response from the developers has been extraordinarily great.”

Cerny also sees the continuing overlap between console and PC gaming, including many of Sony’s PlayStation 5 games already being available on PC, as a bonus. “It’s specifically helping us with PS5 Pro because the games are on high-end PCs, so they can look at what they did for the several-thousand-dollar PCs and then pick and choose what they want to bring to PS5 Pro.”

Playing games on the Pro

I hopped around several TV stations in a single room, trying out snippets of PS5 games with early versions of Pro upgrades. Sony didn’t allow CNET’s video team to directly capture footage from the Pro to show the advantages, perhaps because the game updates might still change before November release. I got to play PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of six games side by side on two identical 4K TVs, and I also played a couple of games on a much larger 80-inch 8K TV, too.

Many of the games I played, including Horizon: Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, focused specifically on how the new, best-of-both-worlds 4K/60fps Pro mode felt to play. Answer: It feels great. Just running through the grass in the The Last of Us, or looking out at waterfalls in Horizon, was lovely. Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet & Clank just felt a lot better to play at smoother, higher frame rates on a big canvas. That said, many of the upgrades were on the subtle side. Sometimes I had to stop and check side by side to appreciate the difference.

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Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth in particular popped compared to the fuzzier graphics on the existing PS5 version. Everything was sharper, and still 60fps smooth. It felt like putting new glasses on.

My demo of F1 24 showed new ray tracing effects during a rainy race, which made the track and environment feel more photorealistic. Rain on the pavement reflected the car and the sky, and glass walls near me showed the stands across the road. 

Gran Turismo 7 was maybe the most stunning demo of all, because it added two new modes. 8K gameplay on an 80-inch screen made me wonder how this could be used for sim racing setups with massive displays. Ray tracing, finally added into GT7’s gameplay in another 4K mode, made crowded races with cars feel even more real. I was so hypnotized by looking at car finishes that I kept crashing.

What is next-gen, anyway?

Four years after the PS5 debuted in the middle of a pandemic, time seems to have flown. But right now is actually past time for when Sony tends to release midcycle console upgrades. The PlayStation 4 Pro arrived three years after the PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 5 debuted four years after that. By that math, maybe the PS6 could come four years from now.

Consoles aren’t at a “next-gen” point yet, but who knows if they’ll ever be. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its subscription library running everywhere, game streaming is continuing to spread, and smaller PC gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck are reinventing ways to play games, and rediscovering what consoles can be. Sony has opened many of its games onto PC, so there are already a bunch of PlayStation gamers who don’t have a PlayStation at all.

PC gaming, which Sony is increasingly involved in — lots of flagship first-party games coming to Steam, and the PlayStation VR 2 now having its own PC adapter — is a landscape of perpetual change. There are already plenty of games that can optimize to many GPUs and displays: It’s expected. To a PC gaming crowd, a PS5 Pro may or may not seem appealing. But for someone who wants to play bleeding-edge games with stepped-up graphics on their own amazing TV, the PS5 Pro looks like exactly the step-up splurge.

I’ll admit, I was a little surprised at first that the PS5 Pro demos I saw were all of established PS5 games, with no new and exciting content in sight. But that’s part of the point of the Pro: It’s a performance upgrade to the same platform, not a whole new console. That should be comforting to existing PS5 owners, because a lot of them probably don’t need the upgrade.

And yet, 4K 60 fps gaming is so tempting if you have the display for it. In all the demos I tried, I found myself wondering if I’d just want to play everything in this mode and never look back. It was hard to return to 30 fps gaming on some of the PS5’s fastest-paced games like Ratchet & Clank or Spider-Man 2.

I know a lot of multiplatform gamers, and I wonder if the expectations for Sony are that their own gamers will increasingly be that way too. “I think multidevice players are growing, but it’s not a significant portion from the PlayStation console community point of view at this moment. But I think more customers want to kind of play on multiple devices, so that will grow,” Nishino said. 

VR and the future of peripherals like Portal

As CNET’s resident VR expert, I’m curious what the PS5 Pro can do for the PlayStation VR 2, although Sony’s support for the headset has been underwhelming lately. Cerny said the Pro will allow higher-resolution games on the PSVR 2 thanks to the GPU boost and eventually a tuning of Sony’s AI upscaling that will work with all VR games. But no specific PSVR 2 upgraded games have been announced yet, and I wonder what those improvements would even feel like. (I mentioned to Cerny and Nishino that I’d still love to see original PSVR games like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, which are incompatible with PSVR 2, to get ports that still haven’t happened yet. I didn’t get a response to that comment.)

I also wonder about other peripherals to come. The PlayStation Portal, released last fall, enables remote PS5 gaming in a handheld form, but it’s dependent on Wi-Fi speeds, which can affect performance. Would a PS5 Pro improve future wireless handheld accessories? According to Sony, over 60% of Portal owners are new to remote play, despite existing streaming solutions for remote play being available before on phone and tablet apps. A Portal successor might be in Sony’s future, perhaps one with Wi-Fi 7.

Not everyone will upgrade, but it might attract new owners

A $700 midcycle upgrade console like the PS5 Pro isn’t an expense most people will be up for, especially since the original PS5 is still a perfectly good game console. Sony seems to be ready for this reality, and Cerny and Nishino acknowledged that previous console upgrades have also been big draws for newcomers to PlayStation, too. A significant percentage of PS4 Pro buyers were new customers, according to Sony, and the same is true for PS5. That suggests a new wave of would-be PS5 gamers might come aboard with the Pro.

“Most markets have a pro model, so in that respect, consoles are just the same; it might just be that their addressable market is not as big as that of phones or PCs,” Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said of the PS5 Pro. “According to Sony, there is not much of a lift required for games to run on the Pro, taking advantage of the new specs. Console vs. PC should be more of a question of preference than of priority. The experience is not better. It is just different.”

In that sense, the PS5 Pro might be seen as a console alternative to gaming PCs. In 2024, PC gaming expectations are greater than they were four years ago, and the PS5 Pro can keep up with how games are already being upgraded. I wouldn’t want to upgrade from a PS5 right now myself, but if I were getting a PS5 for the first time I’d strongly consider the Pro for any TV upgrades I make in the future.