The PS5 Pro Is An Overpriced Upscaler

The Playstation 5 Pro was unveiled September 10^th, 2024 during a Playstation technical presentation stream hosted by Playstation’s Lead System Architect, Mark Cerny. Mark mainly spoke on three points of improvement for the PS5 Pro: A larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI-driven upscaling. All of these aspects are welcome additions to games that are going to be updated or created with these features in mind, however I as well as many others shuddered when the subject of price was casually shown at the end of the presentation.

Yes, those prices being:

• $959.99 CAD
• $699.99 USD
• $1,199.99 AUD
• €799.99 EUR
• £699.99 GBP
• ¥119,980 JPY

_{A moment of silence for those countries who are ruined by conversion rates…}

Is It Worth It To Buy A PS5 Pro?

The PS5 Pro also comes as a digital only version out of the box, meaning if you want to play your prized physical collection like I do, you’ll be spending an extra $100 (CAD). I’m sure at those prices many refused to humor the machine regardless of what it brought, but for the players who can budget for it, is it worth it to buy a Playstation 5 Pro? My thoughts are… No. At least… Not yet. Let’s break down the realities of each point Mark Cerny made.

A Larger GPU

Mark talked about how the new graphics chip is physically larger allowing for 67% more compute units, which assuming are of the same power as the original PS5, should provide more processing power. This along with 28% faster RAM can potentially result in UP TO 45% faster rendering under preferred circumstances. The key point to take away from this is Sony is hoping the PS5 Pro will be able to remove the need for using performance sliders between fidelity and performance modes or at least tighten up performance to make the fidelity modes run at higher frame rates.

Advanced Ray Tracing

The ray tracing was the part Mark was the most vague about, despite this whole presentation being vague. Apparently they took a streamlined approach to allow the PS5 Pro to calculate the rays at double or triple the speeds of the regular PS5. I’m not quite sure why it was explained as an either or option and not a scalable feature. The lack of transparency on the subject lends to the rumor that has surfaced a few months ago pertaining to the PS5 Pro using RDNA4, the new unreleased AMD GPU microarchitecture.

AI-Driven Upscaling

The Playstation 5 Pro will launch with added hardware to work with an artificial intelligence library called PSSR or Playstation Spectral Super Resolution which attempts to simplify rendering on a game by game basis aiming for higher resolution gameplay. As AI can be finnicky and require a lot of QA testing, I’m interested to see how this works out for them as it could potentially cause bugs that weren’t there before, but I’m hopeful due to the Playstation 5 Pro having consistent hardware, meaning there’s no room for user or parts manufacture discrepancies. Let’s hope third-party developers do enough QA to take advantage of this feature.

The Reality

Right now the PS5 Pro is a tough sell. The current games supported for it, don’t show much of a difference unless zooming in on distant objects and squinting at your monitor is your cup of tea. This is especially pointless if you plan on playing your PS5 Pro sitting away from your TV on a couch. While I think the features will be used better on games coming out in the future, I wouldn’t expect it to be by much. All games released for the PS5 Pro must still run properly on the regular PS5, which means that many smaller developers or low budget titles may not even bother to put in the money and developer time to create two or more different performance profiles for the Playstation 5 and it’s Pro model and will just stick to what the base Playstation 5 can handle. Another issue is all of the old games you currently have will require an update to even use the power of the PS5 Pro. So many players wished to be able to play Red Dead Redemption 2 at 60 FPS. This PS4 game, despite being playable at 60 FPS on a soft-modded base PS5 is still stuck at 30 FPS because Rockstar hasn’t released a patch to use the PS5’s power to increase performance. The same issue could happen to many current PS4 and PS5 games that weren’t created with the Pro in mind. Expect only the highest end AAA titles to make use of the PS5 Pro’s extra power especially if they aren’t exclusives and are made to run on Xbox or Nintendo consoles as well.

Conclusion

$1,187.18 Canadian Dollars after tax is the price you’ll pay for a PS5 Pro that can actually play the games on your shelf. With the hardware being constrained to it’s contemporaries and developers needing to put in extra effort to use the console’s specialties, it’s unlikely that the system will be able to shine beyond some Sony Entertainment exclusives. I can’t recommend anyone who already owns a PS5 to purchase this unless they’re a Playstation enthusiast. As for players without a PS5, I suppose you could pick this up if it’s in your budget and you want to “Future proof” your Playstation 5 experience as much as possible, however with the price tag, and with how common it is for pre-built gaming PCs to be put on clearance. If you’re going to go for performance, I’d just go for a PC and wait for the PS6 or Switch 2 if you want a new console.