Exclusive Hands-On: I Played Sony’s All-New PS5 Pro :- When you play Gran Turismo 7 on an 80-inch TV, you feel like you’re really there. In 8K clarity, it looks even more real. I’m not a good driver, but part of the reason is that the views in front of me are so clear.
I’m also amazed by a brand-new 4K mode that makes other drivers see their own cars in the reflections. It’s almost like I’m in VR but I don’t have mine on.
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I’m at Sony’s PlayStation offices in San Mateo, California. There are TVs in the room, and all of them are showing demos of well-known games like Spider-Man 2 and Ratchet and Clank.
They’re using the brand-new PlayStation 5 Pro, which goes on sale on September 26 and costs $700 (£700) when it comes out on November 7. On a side-by-side monitor, Mark Cerny, Sony’s lead PlayStation system engineer, shows me around the demos and points out the Pro’s improvements over the regular PS5.
I can tell the change as I jump back and forth. The edges are sharper, the edges are smoother, or both. I’d rather play on the PS5 Pro. A PS5 that isn’t Pro can be bought for $500 right now, and it will probably be even cheaper during the holiday deals. I’m not sure if the sometimes small improvements will be worth the price for many people.
The PlayStation 5 Pro is not the PlayStation 6, which probably won’t come out for another three or four years. It’s also not for everyone. It’s a big piece of hardware with better graphics that can keep up with PCs and maybe even beat them in some ways.
The PS5 Pro is all about making games on a big TV more fun. A more powerful GPU means more ray-tracing and smooth 4K and 60-frames-per-second gaming for all games that get the Pro update. Other PlayStation games will automatically upscale their AI as well.
Also, ray tracking, a fancy way to make graphics look like light, will be used a lot more. Games will get speed boosts for the Pro version. Sony says that 40 to 50 games will get patches when the system comes out in November.
I talked to Cerny and Hideaki Nishino, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Platform Business Group, and played more than six games on the PS5 Pro. We talked about what the update means for the future of PlayStation games and what’s coming up.
When I saw the PS5 Pro, I thought it would be huge. The shape of the system is very similar to the original PS5, but it’s smaller. In contrast, the “Slim” PS5, which came out last year, is smaller than the Pro, but not by a huge amount.
The turbo-style fans are about the same size.
The black ribbed vents across the middle, which were hinted at in Sony’s 30th anniversary logo, are the biggest changes on the outside. (These letters mean that the Pro won’t fit with current PS5 covers.) On the back, there is an extra USB-C port instead of a USB-A port.
The PS5 Pro should fit on the same shelves as your older PS5, unlike the bigger PS4 Pro that came out in 2016. You can also use the $30 stand to place the Pro vertically if you’d like.
The DualSense controller that comes with the Pro is the same as the one that comes with the PS5. (There is already a DualSense Edge device that is better.) It’s not possible to put discs into the Pro. There is instead a bigger 2TB SSD and the same support for M2 SSDs that are bigger.
You can connect a different optical drive, the same ones that work with the new PS5 models. You could buy a new one or take one of those off.
It seems like not having an optical drive included is a statement that downloaded games are now the norm. If your router supports Wi-Fi 7, the Pro should be able to download games faster.
Better graphics, 4K at 60 frames per second, and a lot of ray tracing.
It’s all about images with the PS5 Pro. The SSD speed and CPU are the same as the PS5. Sony claims that the GPU has 67% more processing cores, 28% faster RAM, and 45% faster drawing.
Sony wants the Pro to have three big improvements right away because of the new GPU: more ray tracing, automatic AI-assisted game upscaling for 4K, and a new Pro mode for games that will mix 60fps and 4K.
A mode called PlayStation Spectral Super that upscaling with AI
Resolution, works with all games, but games need to be updated with a patch that adds features to make it work at 4K. Next, Cerny said it would work with PSVR 2 games as well.
Mark Cerny and I are looking at improvements to ray tracing.
Forty to fifty games will get improvements for the PS5 Pro when it comes out on November 7. All of them will get 4K and 60fps improvements, and the graphics will also get a lot of other improvements, such as new atmospheric lighting and effects and better overall graphics.
There are more figures in the background and game modes that can go up to 120 frames per second or 8K. I played Gran Turismo 7 in both an 8K and a 4K mode that had a lot of extra ray-tracing effects. Cerny said that the Pro could add a lot of new game types, a lot like PC games.
Cerny also says that TVs with refresh rates that can change from 40 to 120 frames per second will work with the PS5 Pro because games will get faster frame rates without the need for an upgrade patch. There will also be 120 fps modes.
Cerny said that more than 25% of PS5 owners have TVs that can handle 120 frames per second and that about 10% of PS5 users have TVs with variable refresh rates. Even though playing games in 8K is fun, only a small group of PS5 owners can do it because 8K TVs aren’t very popular.
Besides these specific game updates, Sony also promises speed improvements for 8,500 PS4 games that can be played on PS5, in a mode called PS5 Pro Game Boost. Sony also promises improvements for PS5 games in this mode. I couldn’t play any PS4 games to see how they worked.
“I’ve already seen games with three different PS5 Pro modes,” Cerny said of the pre-launch games that have been improved. It gets better over time, especially for games that come out after the gear does.
That way of doing things will become more complex, with less focus on resolution and more on improving picture quality in a number of ways.
Cerny said that moving PC games to the PS4 Pro is easier than it was for the PS4 Pro. Like the PS5, the PS5 Pro has an extremely fast SSD built in. He thinks that these two systems will set the standards for future game styles.
“PS5 Pro uses the new advanced [ray tracing] feature sets that AMD created as the next step in their roadmap architecture,” Cerny said. “But you won’t find any other AMD GPUs that use it yet if you look around.” We pushed for the development, and I’m glad we did because the coders have been so great.
Cerny also thinks it’s great that console and PC games are continuing to mix, with many PlayStation 5 games already being offered on PC. “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.”
In one room, I switched between several TV shows and played short clips of PS5 games with early versions of Pro upgrades. Sony might not have let CNET’s video team directly record footage from the Pro to show its benefits.
The updates to the game could still change before it comes out in November. I could play six games on both a PS5 and a PS5 Pro at the same time on two similar 4K TVs. I also played a few games on an 80-inch 8K TV, which was much bigger.
There were a lot of games I played that were all about how the new 4K/60fps Pro mode felt, like Horizon: Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, Spider-Man 2, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart.
That being said, the PS5 Pro could be seen as an alternative to game PCs in this way. People expect more from PC games now than they did four years ago, and the PS5 Pro can keep up with how games are being improved.
Actually, I don’t want to move up from a PS5 right now, but if I were to buy a PS5, I’d really think about getting the Pro for any future TV upgrades.