PlayStation 5 Pro Review: Great Upscaling, Hard to Justify at $899.99

Before you read a word about the PS5 Pro, run through three questions. Do you own a 4K TV made in the last few years? Does it support variable refresh rate? Do you currently choose Performance mode in PS5 games and wish it looked better?

If the answer to all three is yes, the Pro is aimed squarely at you. If any one is a no, the rest of this review is mostly an explanation of why you should keep your money.

What the Pro changes

Sony's page puts it in three lines: advanced ray tracing, a bigger GPU, and PSSR, short for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. It is AI upscaling, the same idea as Nvidia's DLSS. A game renders at a lower resolution inside, and the console rebuilds a sharp 4K picture from it.

On paper the GPU has about 67% more compute units and renders roughly 45% faster, according to a comparison guide we read, and Sony quotes much stronger ray tracing. Wikipedia lists a 2TB SSD, support for Wi-Fi 7 and an 8K output. The Pro runs all PS5 games and, as Sony's support page confirms, the huge PS4 library too.

Where PSSR earns its money

Digital Foundry's work, as summarised by Notebookcheck, found Final Fantasy VII Rebirth running in a 60fps performance mode at dynamic 4K, built from a base image of about 1152p. That is the Pro in a sentence: a 60fps mode that used to look soft now looks close to a quality mode.

Ray tracing in a 60fps mode is the second big win. Spider-Man 2 is the example reviewers keep returning to, because it can run reflections at the frame rate you want rather than at 30.

Game Boost is the quiet bonus. Digital Foundry reports an average uplift of roughly 30 to 35% from Game Boost, depending on the game, so some titles run smoother with no developer effort at all.

Where it falls short

PSSR is not magic. Silent Hill f's Pro mode produced visible artifacts, enough that some players preferred the standard PS5's performance mode. Early reports on Alan Wake 2 and Dragon's Dogma 2 flagged image quality problems as well. Games need a Pro patch before they use any of this, and not every game gets one.

TechRadar's review title says it all: a high-performing enthusiast console "with a pricey sting in the tail".

playstation.com

The price and the missing pieces

Sony launched the Pro at $699.99 in November 2024, according to Wikipedia. It is now $899.99. A disc PS5 is $649.99 and a Digital Edition is $599.99, at the prices the comparison sites we read were listing. That makes the gap about $250 to $300.