PlayStation 5 Pro: A Leap Forward in Console Gaming

PlayStation 5 Pro - The First Hands-On Preview - IGN

There's a choice that most PS5 players are familiar with: "Favor Graphics" or "Favor Performance." With the PlayStation 5 Pro, Sony's big selling point for its $700 upgraded console is that you'll no longer have to choose what you want to sacrifice. Last week, I went to PlayStation headquarters in San Mateo, California to get my hands on the new console. I played around a dozen games side-by-side on both the PS5 and PS5 Pro, including Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Marvel's Spider-Man 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and The Last of Us Part II Remastered, getting the chance to experience the improvements first-hand, as well as chat with many of the developers responsible for upgrading those games for the new hardware. After playing, I have to say that I'm impressed by the PS5 Pro's capabilities, especially the new AI-powered resolution upscaling system. It carries an expensive price tag that left a lot of folks skeptical about who this is for, but if what I saw is a good indication of what it can do across the board, the PS5 Pro brings a lot to the table for console gamers who are willing to pay a premium for a no-compromises experience. Put simply, at a hardware level, the PS5 Pro is a PS5 with a more powerful GPU. Sony was coy about exact numbers, but their team says it will have 67 percent more compute units than the base PS5, which has 36. Some basic math tells us that it'll be around 60, putting it roughly on par, in PC graphics card terms, with the AMD Radeon RX 6800. Beyond the raw power increase, Sony is touting two major software improvements that support the GPU: better ray tracing, and that upscaling system I mentioned; that's called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR. I'll get into the specifics of all this under-the-hood tech in a moment, but the main takeaway is that Sony promises that games optimized for PS5 Pro will look as good as their old "Favor Graphics" mode, while offering the framerate and general performance level of their old "Favor Performance" mode. From what I played, it's capable of delivering on that. That said, consistency was not the name of the game among how developers labeled their Pro upgrades. It's a little silly that, just as there has never been a universal standard for the various graphics modes on PS5 games so far, the PS5 Pro options are similarly scattered. Spider-Man 2, for example, will have a new "Performance Pro" mode that marries the Graphics and Performance modes from the base console. The Last of Us Part II Remastered, another first-party PlayStation game, calls the same thing "Pro Mode." Over at Square Enix, someone decided Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth should call it "Versatility" mode. Meanwhile, other games, such as Capcom's Dragon's Dogma 2, simply added new "Pro" versions of their existing graphics options. Regardless of what they're called, Sony told me that around 40 to 50 games will have new Pro-enabled modes when the new console launches on November 7. But keep in mind that what that upgrade means for each game is, again, inconsistent. There's only so much you can do with more power if a game wasn't built to use it. For example, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth looks absolutely incredible when set to favor graphics on the base PS5, but at the expense of a 30fps cap. Performance mode, on the other hand, feels much better to play at 60fps, but suffers from significantly lower-fidelity textures that put a damper on the visual feast. The PS5 Pro, however, eliminates the issue - the new Enhanced mode gets you all the visuals of Graphics mode at the 60fps of the Performance mode. That said, Enhanced mode doesn't look any better than the standard PS5's Graphics mode - at least not in a way that I'd be able to tell without a zoomed-in side-by-side comparison. More powerful hardware means that any game, whether it has a new specialized mode to take advantage of the PS5 Pro or not, should simply run better than it did on an older console - just as how upgrading your graphics card in a gaming PC means that it's easier for your system to render a certain quality level than before. But just putting in a new graphics card isn't going to make a game look better unless you move to a higher (and thus more demanding) graphics setting that the developers built in. The same logic can be applied here: the PS5 Pro will have an easier time rendering a game's standard PS5 modes (Sony is calling this "PS5 Pro Game Boost" - similar to what we saw on PS4 Pro), but things aren't going to look better unless that game's developers put out a new mode with more detailed graphical techniques enabled. In other words, you should keep your expectations in check. The PS5 Pro can certainly pretty up a game - and if developers put in the work, it puts more demanding graphical techniques like ray tracing in reach - but it is not a magical remastering machine. For instance, the upgraded version of Hogwarts Legacy that I played showed off some quite impressive new ray tracing effects, with reflections bouncing from the stained-glass windows of Hogwarts castle onto its polished marble floors, or students walking the halls being reflected in the gleaming surface of a suit of armor as they pass. Light and shadows were similarly impressive, as the bright glow of my Lumos spell scattered into a thousand pieces from the tangled web of a Devil's Snare root. But these ray tracing effects did nothing for the relatively basic character and facial models, which pale in comparison to the visual marvel that is FF7 Rebirth. For that we'd have to wait for the team at Avalanche to do the work of upgrading Hogwarts Legacy in the same way that Naughty Dog did for The Last of Us Parts I and II. All these graphical and performance improvements are made possible in part by PSSR. AI upscaling has existed in the PC realm for several years now in the form of Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), and it's delivered dramatic increases in frame rates without sacrificing visual quality. (AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution, or FSR, does its upscaling via an open-source algorithm.) In short, upscaling allows a game to render at a lower, and thus less demanding, resolution and then upscale to a higher-resolution output. But traditional upscaling techniques have their limits - a frame can only be scaled up so far before the result looks worse than where it started. Introducing AI to the process, however, allows upscalers to generate new high-resolution frames without artifacting and other visual blemishes. In other words, AI upscaling allows a console to start with an even lower resolution and still look great at full 4K, resulting in higher frame rates. Thus far only Nvidia's DLSS has used AI to aid in the upscaling - something that has largely given it a sizable lead over FSR and other upscaling implementations in most benchmark tests. PSSR, meanwhile, uses an AI upscaler that Sony developed in collaboration with AMD - the first of its kind seen in a gaming console, or from AMD as a whole. I mentioned before that the PS5 Pro's approximately 60 compute units put it roughly on par with the AMD Radeon RX 6800, but the RX 6800 (nor any other AMD card on the market right now) isn't doing AI upscaling. PSSR is. From what I've seen, it seems to be capable of achieving similar results to what DLSS has done for PC gaming over the past few years, and I can't wait to see how developers push the graphical envelope now that the hardware can better keep up with their ambitions. Of course, it'll be a good while before we see games designed to take advantage of this power from the ground up. But until then, if you choose to invest in its high price, you'll at least be getting peace of mind that you're getting the best possible PlayStation experience money can buy. For more, be sure to check out our interview with Toshi Aoki, Sr. Principal Product Manager on the PS5 Pro, as well as our roundup of everything announced at yesterday's State of Play.

I played the PS5 Pro, and it's clearly better

Eight years ago, PlayStation lead architect Mark Cerny showed me the power of the PS4 Pro in this very room. Today, I'm checking out the new PS5 Pro instead -- and feeling some major déjà vu. Like before, Sony is showing journalists a room full of screens at its PlayStation US headquarters just outside of San Francisco, playing 11 games side by side on both the original hardware and the guts of the new $700 Pro. Like before, you'll pay a hefty premium for graphical improvements alone. Like before, games will need to be patched to give you most of those boosts, and not all patches will be equal. And like before, those improvements are seriously impressive if your TV is close enough to your couch. This time, it brings out details like individual blades of grass, improves the density of particles onscreen, unlocks optional 8K and ray tracing modes, and even reduces the distracting shimmering that often popped up in games on the original console. Michiel van der Leeuw, technical director on all the Horizon games, shows me how much smoother Horizon Forbidden West can be on the PS5 Pro, how much sharper now that it's sampling textures that render more crisply, and how it no longer needs to display the same ugly clouds. "It was as if a pair of dirty goggles had been lifted from my eyes," I wrote in 2016 about the PS4 Pro. I get the exact same vibe from Horizon and most other PS5 Pro Enhanced games I'm trying now. I'll get into more details below, but I want you to know my conclusion isn't quite the same as it was eight years ago. While it's clearly better than the PS5, I'm not yet sold. That's mostly because Sony is charging several hundred dollars more than last time -- but also partly because I had to stand so close to the 4K screen to get that eye-popping result. Sony's demos keep us so close to the TVs it's impossible not to see improvements, with fixed-length wired controllers encouraging us to stay nearby. When I step back anyhow, the PS5 Pro's graphical improvements get harder to make out. Some disappear at six feet, most of them at 10 feet, in game after game. That's a bit further than I measured with the PS4 Pro vs. PS4 eight years ago. But if you're the kind of person who already sets your PS5 games to "Quality" or "Fidelity" or "Graphics" mode rather than "Performance," I bet you'll see a huge increase in smoothness with the PS5 Pro no matter how far away you sit. Some went from utterly choppy to downright buttery for me on the PS5 Pro, with almost all the visual quality (if not more) than the original PS5's fidelity modes. The biggest surprise for me, though, was seeing a console that can offer so many of the immersive benefits of ray tracing without massive slowdowns. It's unlikely many games will add ray tracing modes specifically for the PS5 Pro, but Formula One racing game F1 24 already had them -- and it now lets you drive at an upscaled 4K and 60fps with them turned on. When producer Simon Lumb flicks ray-traced graphics on and off for me, it feels like the whole image comes to life. Suddenly, the car's crash-protection halo casts realistic shadows on the bodywork; reflections naturally appear in puddles on the track and on the car's shiny hood; windows appear to refract light. Both F1 24 and Gran Turismo 7 will let you choose other modes instead of ray tracing. They can optionally use the PS5 Pro's extra horsepower and AI upscaling to offer an 8K picture (for the few and proud with 8K TVs), or a smoother 120Hz mode at 4K upscaled resolution instead. But now that I've experienced it, I'd pick ray tracing every time. Quick note: if a developer says their game is running at "4K" resolution, you should know that's not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison with other "4K" games. In every case, the PS5 Pro is outputting a 4K picture to your TV thanks to the magic of AI upscaling, with all the crispness that provides. The game's internal render resolution may be quite a bit lower, though, and it varies as you play, all of which can affect the end quality. Developers tell me that Sony's PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling can keep up with all of that, turning a 720p image into a 4K one on the fly at 59.94 frames per second -- but 720p upscaled to 2160p may not look as good as 1440p upscaled to 2160p, of course. Some developers might still want to sacrifice frame rate for resolution if Sony lets them. (A leaked document suggests they might, but Sony has not confirmed.) Also: while developer after developer tells me the PS5 Pro provides "the best of both worlds" with fidelity and performance, the PS5 Pro doesn't quite offer double the performance of the original console -- so some small sacrifices are being made. For example, Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 actually runs at a lower render resolution in its new PS5 Pro "Performance Pro" mode than it does in the "Fidelity" mode on the original PS5. While I vastly preferred the PS5 Pro experience, it does lead to some interesting edge cases where fine detail on certain objects (like windows on distant buildings) might not be quite as easy to make out. With Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, the same developer took a different tack: if you look closely, there are actually fewer spectators in the stands in the PS5 Pro's "Performance Pro" mode compared to the vanilla PS5's "Fidelity" mode. Still, the game looks both smoother and crisper thanks to the PS5 Pro changes, so it's hard for me to complain. When developers do have to choose, several tell me they decided to prioritize "stability," fixing the most glaring sacrifices they had to make on the original console. But some games will ship with their original Performance and Fidelity modes, too, in case you prefer them. And a few games really do look like the best of both worlds: I couldn't find a single sacrifice in my short time with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth -- the hair and fine details on PS5 Pro even exceed the original PS5's "Graphics" mode. We're looking forward to getting a PS5 Pro in for testing so we can do a full review. Meanwhile, I'll leave you with some rough notes on each game I saw!

Sony Breaks Down the PS5 Pro's Tech and Reveals That It Was in the Works Before the PS5 Even Released - IGN

We talk to PlayStation designer Toshi Aoki about the PS5 Pro's tech, making the disc drive separate, and more. When Sony finally announced the PlayStation 5 Pro in mid-September, it was hardly a surprise; after all, Sony's new, more powerful PS5 had been rumored for months. But if PlayStation Senior Principal Product Manager Toshi Aoki is to be believed, the PS5 Pro has been in the works longer than anyone could have guessed, revealing that it had been under discussion even before the original PS5 was released in 2020. "We started discussing it before the PS5 actually came out...because the PS5 specs were already locked in. We were ready to launch and everything. [...] We knew, of course, as you mentioned, technologies evolve every year," Aoki explains, saying that PlayStation "can't really stop" when it comes to technological innovation. Aoki was on hand to help break down PlayStation's new premium console, which features a more powerful GPU, AI upscaling, and other improvements. Speaking with IGN, he talked about some of the technology advancements that were not yet available when the base PS5 was still under development. "I think it's more from the technological point of view of... Even the AI upscaling, it's not easy...it takes time to get there...So as we were trying to target the best of both worlds...that's why we invested in seeing the other ways that we can get games into that space for high fidelity 60 FPS. That's why AI upscaling was the option that we took and we looked into and developed." The AI upscaling that Aoki refers to, called PlayStation Spectral Super Revolution (PSSR), is perhaps the PS5 Pro's biggest selling point. As the rough equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR, it gives developers the tools they need to upscale their games without sacrificing overall performance. It comes up again and again when individual developers talk about the material improvements that the PS5 Pro has to offer. Aoki says that PSSR is similar in many ways to its competition, the main difference being that it's trained specifically on PlaySation games, with the end result being that it "works more closely with the games on PS5." Gran Turismo 7 was among the games playable at Sony's event, with the PS5 Pro's upscaling capabilities cranking it up to 8K 60fps. Don't expect too many games in that realm -- even Aoki admits that the technology is in its "infancy" -- but it's still impressive to see in motion. "So even with the PS5 Pro, we do have 8K games support, but that's not our headline. It's more of the cherry on the cake...if you are one of the small percentage of people who have an 8K TV, you could get that from supported games. It is something that we have to work together with developers and also the TV manufacturers in the future....But right now we are really focused on the main use cases, which is 4K TV owners having that high-level visual fidelity and playing at [60 FPS]." In the meantime, the PS5 Pro generally favors improvements to the GPU over the CPU. Aoki says that the PS5 Pro contains "dedicated custom hardware" co-developed with AMD that is in the GPU block, and that games will be patched to use that part of the block. Insomniac is among the developers with ideas on how to further improve Spider-Man 2 even after the PS5 Pro's release, with Director of Core Technology Mike Fitzgerald saying that that the ray tracing capabilities of the PS5 Pro are "sort of a level above the standard PS5" and that the team has some "cool ideas about what we can do with that." Guerrilla Games, for its part, is using the PS5 Pro to do away with checkerboard rendering -- an upscaling technique common during the PS4 Pro era -- to focus on rendering Horizon: Forbidden West in 4K. The PS5 Pro update also features notably less jittering and artifacting than previous versions, including in cutscenes. "So in cinematics, in close-ups of Aloy and all the other characters, there's a lot more smooth and stable imagery...So yeah, it makes us very happy that we were able to do this," says Lead Lighting Artist Roderick van der Steen. Guerrilla, of course, has a long history of using PlayStation's technology to the fullest, so it's no surprise that its engineering team seems to have the most ideas out of any developer on how to take advantage of the PS5 Pro's added capabilities. "These things are very exciting to use, like if you get a toy box, which is a whole bunch of extra power and see what to do with it," says Guerrilla Technical Director Michiel van der Leeuw. "Of course, I think the PS5 version in performance mode already looks really good. But yeah, if you have a lot more power, then you can do a lot more to make it look even better." On the flip side, the PS5 Pro's CPU remains unchanged, leading to concerns that it may bottleneck hungrier games like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. Aoki says that games can run at a "slightly faster clock," but that ultimately the GPU is the big difference and the PS5 Pro retains roughly the same hardware configuration. Support for the PS5 Pro's more impressive features may also be inconsistent outside of first-party releases. Sony expects PS5 support for between 40 and 50 games at launch, including high-profile 2024 games like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Dragon's Dogma 2. Aoki says they can benefit in other ways, though. "Even if the game does not support the enhanced directly, there is a game boost feature which makes the current PS5 games and PS4 games run at a higher clock rate. So if those games also have dynamic resolution or variable frame rates, those games also will get a boost and run better," he says. Still, not everyone can easily spot the difference between a PS5 and a PS5 Pro enhanced game. While Final Fantasy VII Rebirth looks noticeably better on Sony's new console, other games mostly offer framerate improvements with only subtle improvements to the graphics. Asked for his reaction, Aoki said that "feeling or experiencing" the PS5 Pro's enhancements is really important. "When you actually see players' preferences through data, a lot of players are playing with 60 FPS because they want that smoother responsiveness, but they're not getting the resolution that they would probably want as well," Aoki says. As for the sometimes subtle enhancements to the graphics, Aoki acknowledges that it's not always easy to convey such improvements. "It's hard to message that out with just the video clips, I think...a lot of players are seeing it on small screens or on phones...how we can showcase interactive entertainment to the players through these devices is a challenge that we all have faced." Then there's the issue of the price. When Sony announced that the PS5 Pro would retail at $700, with the disc drive and vertical stand sold separately, the negative reaction was swift. Asked what about the PS5 Pro justifies a price tag of up to $800, Aoki said, "Well, the technologies that I just mentioned that we are putting in to deliver new experiences for game players, and also not just the technological differences, but the SSD, the Wi-Fi 7, and the new technologies that surround the gameplay as well. So it's more of a full package that will give that exceptional value to the players... the most engaged players that we're targeting." The decision to package the disc drive and vertical stand separately, he says, is a matter of "giving players choices." "Well, with the PS5 Pro, we are offering all these new tech innovations, and we added the two terabyte SSD, as well as the Wi-Fi 7. We believe as a full package that it offers for the most players," he says. "For the disc drive, it is an option for players. Not all players have discs, even though most players may...but we have the option for being able to add that for those players. So I think it's more of the balance of the value proposition that we're giving." Ahead of the PS5 Pro's announcement, we spent some time digging into the issue of rising prices, finding that supply issues and other factors including the weakened yen are likely to be at least partly to blame. At least one analyst also suggested that "lack of competition" may have made it easier for Sony to raise prices. PlayStation, for its part, did not offer further details on the reasoning behind the price point during the event, instead directing IGN back to Aoki's comment. One way or another, Sony is forging ahead with its mid-gen refresh, and its powerful first-party studios are following suit. You can read our full hands-on impressions here, and you can expect lots of more coverage here on IGN ahead of its release on November 7. In the meantime, check out all the best releases of 2024 so far. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

PS5 Pro's Biggest Game Improvements, According to Devs - IGN

We spoke with the tech leads to share what improvements are coming to their games. The PlayStation 5 Pro has officially been revealed, and developers will be releasing new-and-improved modes for their games that will take advantage of all that new horsepower. But what will it mean, really? At a recent PlayStation 5 Pro preview event, we spoke with the technical leads of some of PlayStation's biggest games, including Marvel's Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2, and others, to discuss what improvements we can expect to see now that there's a more powerful PlayStation 5 on the market. There are three key features of the PS5 Pro as explained by lead architect Mark Cerny during the announcement presentation. The upgraded GPU will allow for 45% faster rendering for gameplay, advanced ray tracing will create better lighting effects, and the AI upscaler, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, will help further improve graphics. All of which you'll see in action in Marvel's Spider-Man 2 according to Mike Fitzgerald, Director of Core Technology at Insomniac Games. "The first big improvement in the PlayStation 5 Pro is PSSR, which is PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, that lets us improve our old upscaling mode. We can render at a lower resolution, bring it up to a full 4K and get tons of extra detail out of the picture," Fitzgerald says. "The second big thing is there's new ray-tracing hardware in the PS5 Pro. We have really nice ray-traced reflections all across Spider-Man 2 and getting to run those faster and do more ray-tracing is a big deal." "And the third big thing altogether is these combined to make a new Performance Pro mode as we're calling it on the PS5 Pro. You get the image quality and visuals of Fidelity Mode at the framerate of Performance Mode." Top of mind for several technical leads, including the folks at Naughty Dog, was how on the base PS5, players would often have to choose between Fidelity Mode, which offered better resolution at lower framerates, typically 30 fps, or Performance Mode which raised the frame rate to 60 at the expense of better graphical textures and ray-tracing. That choice is no longer necessary on the PS5 Pro, which can run games combining better resolution with higher frame-rates. "Well the number one thing is gonna be the ability to play at 60fps in 4K, so that has been a huge deal," Travis McIntosh, Naughty Dog's head of technology says. "It makes it so we don't have to compromise, so you don't have to pick between high fidelity and good performance." The Last of Us Part 2 is one of the games that will be enhanced on the PS5 Pro, with the option to play the game with better visuals while still running it in 60 fps through a new Pro Mode. But McIntosh says that both the Fidelity and Performance Modes will also be improved on the PS5 Pro. "There's more than that, there's also the fact that the high fidelity mode on the base PS5 actually looks even better when you're on Pro. And there are some minor performance issues in performance mode on the PS5 base model that are also much better. Very solid 60 [fps], a lot less frame drops when you get to the pro." But McIntosh also says he's personally excited for PSSR, which uses AI to upscale graphics. "I would say I'm just really excited about the ability to use AI upscaling. Going forward as a developer, as a tech geek we spend a lot of time worrying about pixel throughput. It's actually really tough to hit the targets of getting this many pixels through the game, and now we can focus on cool graphics stuff that we're doing as opposed to just increasing pixel count. So that's been a big benefit." McIntosh goes in-depth on the PSSR technology and how it upscales 1440p resolution to 4K, telling IGN that it, "produces just a way better result than previous upscalers because it can be trained not only on our game but on lots and lots of other games, and it learns and it improves at each iteration can improve and fix graphical errors, fix artifacting, and it learns how to make things look good. Foliage for instance is one example in our game that looks really good after the upscaler because the neural network is trained to do foliage really well." For Guerrilla Games World Lighting lead Roderick van der Steen, the biggest changes to Horizon Forbidden West all have to do with resolution and how improved they'll be on the PS5 Pro, from better lighting to textures on characters. "A big improvement that we could make by using the PS5 Pro is we could increase the resolution, increase stability of the image which is something we really focused on for this patch. And various other aspects like better filtering, better shadowing, and better volumetrics." Van der Steen says these improvements will be seen particularly in complicated models. "So fire, holograms, but also the skin rendering and the hair rendering where we could increase the shadow filtering to give a much more smooth and stable image." Lastly, ray tracing has been around for a few years now, but has often been sacrificed on consoles for anyone who prefers performance mode, which according to PlayStation is a majority of players. But the PS5 Pro is now able to add better ray tracing while maintaining a higher framerate. Just ask Jose Villeta, technical director at Avalanche Software, the developers of Hogwarts Legacy. "So one of the few things we were able to improve on in our game thanks to the PS5 Pro is we focused on three areas," Villeta reveals. "First we integrated PSSR - that gives a better upscaled image technology. And second we focused on ray-tracing, we tried to enable not only the best ray-tracing capabilities but improve the ray-tracing we had before. We were able to bring ray-tracing shadows, we were able to increase the percentage of ray-tracing reflections so they look sharper and have more content and detail." The improvements are a result of the better GPU which Villeta credits for giving Hogwarts extra heft. "The extra power we can actually make sure that all our visual modes, we have Fidelity, Fidelity with ray-tracing, and Performance mode, are all running at better framerate." Spider-Man 2, The Last of Us Part 2, Horizon Forbidden West, and Hogwarts Legacy are just four of the many games confirmed for improvements on the PS5 Pro, and we can expect to see even more Pro-enhanced games as we get closer to the new console's launch on November 7.