Opinion: As The Dust Settles On PS5 Pro, I'm Still Glad Xbox Didn't Bother

I would agree with many things said in this article. I don’t think a pro system was needed this gen and this is not about bashing Sony. I’m too grown to be playing in the system wars. These are just my opinions. Visually there’s not much of a difference between the PS5 and the PS5 pro. It was different last gen after the consoles came out, many people were picking up 4K TVs. They wanted to see that higher resolution. There’s also not many games taking advantage of the pro system and then the 700 dollar price tag on top of that. The one thing I hope all console manufacturers get out of this is we don’t want to pay 700 for a console. Maybe it’ll deter them in the future from pricing a system that high.

I had it in my basket and didn’t do it. They were still available today.

I have read up more now and of course some DF.
Basically some bits good some not so good.

The last of us a beautiful game had a better picture in PS5 quality mode.
The Pro of course run it at 60fps but uses this new PSSR but it was slightly worse when pausing and zooming in than the PS5 quality mode picture wise, something about grass etc.

See they seem to use the standard lower resolution say 1440p and use PSSR to upscale.

I have always said and it shows you can’t beat native 4K for picture perfect.

So basically it’s all a bit of tricky upscaling with not a lot of benefit.

I had the Xbox one x mid generation upgrade and a game like farcry 4 run at native 4K looked better than the Xbox one version that’s an upgrade native 4K.

PS5 Pro £700 no thank you Sony.

My “pro” console for this generation turned out to be a pc. A significant upgrade over my series x and ps5 thanks largely to a far more capable cpu and an nvidia gpu which has all the cutting edge ai technologies in addition to its raw power. At £700 the ps5 pro just doesn’t represent great value for me, it’s still using the same ancient cpu as the base ps5. The gpu technologies are a combination of amd’s rdna raytracing which is still years behind nvidia and a bespoke ai upscaling solution that is unlikely to surpass dlss which has a huge lead in both development time and iterations. It’s also been confirmed that the ps5 pro will still have some 30fps games, and for £700 that’s a deal breaker.

This feels more like a market test for pricing than a Pro version

Well if you want to play the games the best way possible ,I suppose that's a reason to buy one, gta6 and cod will look better and play better on the pro and Sony will use that in there advertising, they're already pushing this console harder than they ever did for the ps4 pro, if you can afford one and want one go for it , if you can't afford one or you don't want one , that's fine too , but don't crap on the console or the people who have one.

Disagree. Series X has too many games with poor frame rates and it does feel held back by series S. It seems to me there has been lack of pushing the series X and only a few titles that hint at what the series X would be capable off. As someone who appreciates tech in games and wishes to see platforms pushed hard, its been difficult generation, but particularly for xbox.
Ive also recently changed tv, and where I used to be able to handle 30fps for some titles, I now feel ill playing pretty much anything at 30 fps. Improvements in tech that help with frame rate consistency and offer higher refresh rates are therefore extremely welcome to me.
I acknowledge such machines are intended for a small subset of players (maybe 10%), but I'm part of that group, and will very much notice the changes. 20 years developing tech pathways for AAA games means you have to notice, and I cant turn that off.
Choice is good thing, and Im glad I get that choice elsewhere.

As Ive already acknowledged though, 90% of players wont notice much of a difference and certainly wont want to pay for it. I will definitely notice and enjoy, and I bought my pro within 10 minutes of it going live. My only regret was not getting the 30th anniversary one as my basket f****d up!

I watched that DF video. I can definitely see improvements. The biggest improvement for me is image quality, games look how we were promised on the X and 5. For the love of god though, stop pushing 8k, it’s dead, no one is interested.

While I can see and appreciate the improvements, it’s not enough for me to personally upgrade from the PS5 I already own, especially as it has no disc drive as standard and half the PS5 games I own are on disc. I ain’t paying an extra £100 so I can play games I already own.

I’ll keep a watchful eye on the Pro, it’s a sign of what’s next and what we can expect from PS6 and that’s interesting, but right now I have no interest in buying one due to the price and lack of disc drive.

Bingo, I'm still kinda of waiting on Microsoft to step up the game and push the Series X to its limits as is.

If they did I wouldn't be buying it no way am I spending over 500 quid on a console maybe if I was single no kids or misses on my own but I'm not that selfish to my family to do that!

I mean I'm not sure why a different option is ever a bad thing. I felt the same about the Series S despite the concerns raised.

For me, I have the extra money coming in and it will be the best way to play games so I decided to bite. It was a near run thing though and I understand if people think it just isn't worth it.

I personally don't mind the cost for 3 years or so at the best console quality.

I’m a die-hard PS fan but have zero interest in dropping $700 on a console I’d have to add a disc drive to in order to access my already owned games.

I’ll happily stick with my peasant-class PS5.

@OldGamer999 DLSS can look better than native 4k. PSSR isn’t there yet as it’s new but these AI upscalers are the future like it or not. You have to leave the native 4k thing behind my friend.

If anything Microsoft needed the Pro more than Sony as our first party studios really have trouble getting past 30fps, of course that would have created a nightmare because of the S so now both companies have two systems developers have to develop for.

It definitely wouldn't move the needle for xbox. It's not like that would lead to much for console sales. This is a very niche market. It wouldn't target new gamers for the xbox ecosystem and would really just be targeting the very small super consumer group that would upgrade from their seriesX.

Personally I would rather wait an extra 2 years and get a new generation of consoles. I wouldn't want to spend close to $800 then do it all over again in a short time when the new ones come out. The generation gap is already very small, ps5 pro will only make ps6 look like even less of an upgrade.

@Fenbops
Well if they stopped trying to get to realistic, ray tracing, level of detail etc they could stick with 4K and probably 60fps.
Also many many games are becoming badly optimised, especially if they are multi platform.
Just look at SW outlaws it’s not great upscaling from 1080p and God knows why, it does not look that good.

But I do take your point it is future but for all the wrong reasons.

@Fenbops Never a truer word said. The best ai upscaling offers better picture quality than native rendering. Internal rendering resolution as a metric has lost all meaning on PC and it will be the same on pro. In an extreme case this might mean a 1440 30fps game on ps5 will have 1080p 60fps version on pro with better output picture quality.
Dlss is the class leader currently, but Sonys new ai upsampler is already an impressive second, and as it develops via firmware updates it will get even better.
Options for devs are good and will let them offer different modes for different customers..

Exciting times, I always enjoy new tech that really changes things!

@Titntin heh, I think many of us are just suckers for shiny new things! I’d love to splash on a PS5 Pro, but no way I can spend that much.

I already have a Series X that I still play every day, and will settle for a regular PS5 when I decide to supplement my gaming, some time next year

Good news is all the games will still play perfectly fine on the S/X/5

But how many times have people moaned that they want FPS and Graphics? So Sony have given this option.

I’m all for options, that’s why I think games should have both a 30/60 mode.

This gen still doesn’t feel “all in” to me. There are great games out but many I feel aren’t too dissimilar from last gen and with a lot of the same issues. I sorta wish the console manufacturers would sit in a holding pattern until devs and publishers get their act together. A lot of stuff has been going on for a long time and throwing new hw at it isn’t fixing the problem. Performance issues due to poor optimization or QA, delays, day 1 patches that are massive… i find myself more and more pulling away from looking towards the future of gaming.

Yeah I have no real interest in a PS5 Pro, especially when I took a look at it's list of enhanced titles. There simply isn't enough in the way of new games pushing the boundaries to make me want a newer more expensive console right now.

I wonder what Sony and Xbox do with their controllers next gen. On the one hand xbox is behind on the features of their controller. But on the other hand the features Sony offer are hardly ever used and very gimmicky, I don't feel that it adds anything to the experience. I could see both of them course correcting in opposite directions next gen. Xbox deciding to catch up and sony deciding it's not worth it to push the controller as anything more than an input device.

I feel like developers rushing to get games to a playable state before their publisher demand they launch don't really consider the controller features very much. And they will pretty much all be releasing on pc where it's anyone's guess which controllers are being used.

I saw F1 25 on the pro and it makes me wish I was either a Sony player or Xbox had a pro.

@GotRedOnMe73 I didnt mention that bit, I am a complete sucker for shiny new tech! Ive bought just about everything since the buisness started, had to import it all in the early days as gaming wasnt much of a thing in the west back then. I bought a neo geo when they first appeared for stupid money (about £1600 inflation adjusted) , so the Pro didnt feel that bad.
I barely get time to play the switch that I have, but I'll be first in the queue for switch 2!

I'm the first person to say everything said here and more in every article about the PS5 Pro. It's absolutely true, and people do need to be informed about it. More importantly prospective buyers need to be truly informed about what they're really getting vs what the marketing has a lot of buyers thinking they're getting. It isn't that. It's a $700 scaler with a mostly insignificant performance bump and a larger SSD. If a better scaler is worth $700 to people, fine, it's a terrible, horrifying value proposition but if that's what people want, fine, but they need to know thats what they're buying. 1TB and an AI scaler. The GPU bump is marginal and mostly just able to smooth out framerates a little better.

The problems with the pro are that the base console was released too soon before tech was where it needed to be to be a valid leap, and thus as new games came out these base consoles both look awful. Then the second problem is not ENOUGH time has gone by since then at the current evolution of tech to have a meaningful upgrade from it so it feels like a half-step for a whole price. Selling that as sort of a "do over" so the games "suck less than before" feels wrong on both counts. The ROOT problem is that both consoles are just PCs now, and developers don't truly make versions of the game meant to run at it's best on the hardware at hand, all games are made for some future hardware that doesn't exist yet and/or PCs.

Even so, it just seems like bad form for an Xbox site to have a whole article putting down a PS model. Even though it's true, even though the rumor of the PS5 pro and my expectations on price being spot on being among the things that pushed me to PC to begin with...just seems...wrong. It's a discussion to argue from within the PS community but seems a bit cheap to argue about it from without.

I think this is a conversation that WILL come back across all parties during the run up to next gen though, where we know both companies will now be looking at those $700+ price points as valid. People insist "no, Sony knows that's enthusiasts and they need an affordable console for the masses." Many of these are the same people that insisted "No PS5 Pro won't be $750 LOL, they know better, it'll be $550-600 and the base console will be $450-500!" Phil already lubed us up for "consoles will be, maybe, more expensive than people are used to paying." We know what's coming from both of them.

@Titntin not sure I agree with PSSR being second, haven’t DF said it’s not quite up to XeSS just yet either, but it’s an impressive start and a huge improvement over FSR which is complete dog poo. The only thing I would say is that DLSS is amazing but the vast majority of users are using monitors obviously so it’s easier to present a clearer image on a smaller screen. With PSSR it’ll be the reverse with most playing on TV’s I imagine so that in itself will be interesting.

@OldGamer999 I agree with devs relying on upscaling too much instead of optimising their games properly, that definitely happens. But if these AI upscalers improve image quality and give performance back that’s only a positive thing. If a dev can get it right and optimise and use an upscaler, it’s golden.

I hope the best for PlayStation, they are doing many things well. In my taste this is not one of them, and I'm glad Xbox skipped the mid-gen refresh altogether (at least, that's what it seems).

But, PS5 Pro leave a lot of questions on the table:
Is this the price we need to be prepared on the future?

How could these hardware sell if it's that complicated to show their advantages in YouTube, TV ads?

Is this the end of pursuing high-end graphics, that are moving away consoles from a convenient and relatively cheap way to play games, appealing to the mass market?

We will see.

What Nintendo have proved and probably smartly done in a few ways.
You can get around all this flash stuff within reason and sell over 140 million consoles and millions of games.

@Fenbops People are unnecessarily harsh on FSR. Yes, people on the PC side complain about FSR because compared to DLSS it's bad. People on the console side say FSR is bad because, well, just look at it, but FSR has multiple modes, and both consoles seem to be using the performance mode most of the time which, yes, looks absolutely horrible, across the board and nobody should use it ever, the Ultra mode (on PCs) looks quite good. As good as DLSS? No. But a heck of a lot better than the console mode used. FSR isn't the best, but it gets an unfair rep because of how consoles abuse it, and because of just how good DLSS is.

@NEStalgia Agreed. FSR, itself, isn't bad. How developers have been using it is the bad part!

@Titntin I think the Series X can match the Playstation easily, but it's held back by the S and poor console sales (most developers will us PS5 as the base and then port to Xbox).

That being said I'm of the opinion that great art design will always beat "realistic" graphics. I would rather have that with smooth gameplay than the best, hi-fidelity, most extreme graphics but inconsistent framerates.

No need if games aren't even releasing on a regular basis. Jus sayin....

@NEStalgia I’m harsh on FRS but I do accept your point. Developers are using FSR trying to upscale from unreasonable resolutions. It goes back to what Oldgamer was saying, optimisation should come first.

@Titntin I think it’s a little premature to say that PSSR is the second best upscaler on the market. It’s one of three AI upscalers, DLSS is the obvious leader at this point in time, but the dedicated hardware based version of XeSS from intel wasn’t far off. FSR has always trailed both as it doesn’t rely on specific hardware and is a software implementation. I would wait for a proper deep dive into PSSR before saying it’s the second best upscaler right now.

I love my XSX. But when Xbox has options like the S, I dont understand why that's OK, but a more powerful option than the XSX isn't. This article comes across as defensive fanboi stuff. Consumer options is a great thing. And I'd love there to be a more powerful XSX available.

@Fenbops Also FWIW, 8k matters for VR. It matters a LOT actually. Right now current GPUs are holding back VR because they only have Displayport 1.4 and 4k is already saturating the bandwidth and can't push proper 8k, or soon, 12k, at all. In VR, 8k=4k per eye, at about an inch away from the eye, and it really takes about 9 or 10k for "retina" performance. Since PS does VR it's almost relevant, except that link protocol they're using doesn't support it, their headset can't use it, and there's not the slightest chance the hardware can render it.

I would have considered a Series X-X (?) if it was priced how the 1X was to the 1 but at £700 no way. At £700 I'd just buy a PC (upgrade mine) Would it be as good as a PS5? probably not but it would access to more games (including more and more PS exclusives) and I'd be able to tell it not to waste resources on 4K.

@NEStalgia fair enough. I don’t follow the VR stuff, I have zero interest in it 😂

I'd trade one of my XSX in at Gamestop when they run a promo for a XSX Pro, why not?

@Jenkinss why not? because one doesn’t exist?

Glad Xbox stayed away from mid-gen console refresh since later in the cycle some titles will suffer as with the PS4. I hope it stays at a minimum!

To me the differences were very noticeable, especially with the Formula One game! As a big F1 fan that almost won me over (and better frame rates), but that said, I'd rather wait when the real next-gen consoles come knocking on my door. We got to see a glimpse of the new tech they will be using so interested how that will go further down the line.

And hopefully, devs keep pushing the OG consoles and not simply point at a Pro for better frame rates.

@Utena-mobile Not a cynical question, but an honest one: which games on Series X run notably worse than PS5, due to Series S holding it back?

As someone who buys every system eventually, I'm having a hard time stomaching the 500€ fot the regular PS5, let alone 800€. I've bought a regular PS4 for 200€ near the end of it's cycle and could enjoy all the exclusives for very, very cheap.

Yes, I've paid 500€ for the Series X, but that was a worthwhile purchase for Quick Resume alone. I'm not prepared to pay more than 300€ (250€ would be even better) sometime in the future for the PS5 ultraslim.

I agree with you almost 100% on this, however I can't lie. IF I was in a better position financially, I would most likely buy a PS5 Pro. But since I'm in no position to drop nearly a grand Canadian on a game console, I'll just be sticking with my regular PS5 and Series X for the remainder of this generation.

without reading all the comments... there would be no point when Xbox are already supporting series X, series S and (in many cases) xbox one. yet another model would make things even most constrained

and (without sounding like an arse) money isn't a big issue (as a single grown up without kids!)... but if my xbox backlog was smaller I'd buy a ps5 for the exclusives. but I would buy a standard ps5, 100%. I could buy a ps5 digital and most of the exclusives I want to play for less than the £830 the pro costs with a disk drive and a stand!

Microsoft making a pro would be absolutely pointless, when they do little to no marketing, and when most consumers seem happy buying a series S over an X...

I have a series X and a switch, and play a lot of older games on my series X. I just don't see the huge benefit not on marginally improved graphics... its such marginal returns...

genuinely interested to see this 'biggety generational leap' that xbox talk about with the next console!!

@Neither_scene Your right of course. Until I have the machine and can make my own comparisons its far too early to call it. From the material I have been able to see, it seems pretty competent. Couple that with my usual over optimism and Im over calling it.
Just from a technology point of view I find it really interesting how this will develop. Sonys picture processing in its TVs are generally accepted as being the class leaders, so they do have some form in this area....

@NEStalgia Oh, thank you for the info. I'm a little peasant when it comes to this, lol! I didn't know that 8K was relevant for VR, as I'm yet to decide if VR is for me.

VR feels like it has (had?) the potential to be the "next big thing" in gaming, but so far, I haven't seen this "revolution" (as far as I see it).

@Utena-mobile Id' have to agree with both your points there. The Series X can more than outperform the ps5, its shame we dont see more examples where its clearly apparent.
.... and art design and interesting aethetics always trump tech. Even better when we can have both.

@HarmanSmith Well, it's relevant for VR, though I wouldn't say it's relevant for PSVR at least this generation....4k isn't really relevant there, lol, but in the up and coming near to long range future in VR, it'll be relevant with some true 8k and above headsets coming up, and a 12k one on the horizon.

About 60ppd gives you 'retina display" or "true to life" imaging in VR, and 8k or so gives you about 50-53ppd depending on display and lens. So close though not technically quite there. But in terms of GPU it needs more than that, you need to generally render higher than the actual display resolution because in software it needs to do postprocessing to each frame for lens correction (barrel distortion, chromatic abberation, all the stuff photographers use Photoshop for to correct for a specific lens design.) So to get 8k out you need more like 9 or 10k rendering.

I'm a huge VR fan personally, but it's still in that early tech era for sure. High cost is a big barrier, but Meta is lowering that barrier similar to Series S for 2D, and even with that people aren't biting, similar to Series S for 2D. Some of it is the tech and cost to do "really really good VR" is probably 20 years away for the average person. Some of it is people just not liking the wearable nature of it, and some due to the nausea phenomenon some have, etc....it's hard to get it to take off. But, man, once you get used to it, 2D gaming feels like a different medium entirely, and kind of quaint. But some people just don't take to it.

The tentpoles that sent me back to PC after swearing it off in 2010 or so were: Xbox consoles getting dubious, the PS5 Pro rumors and my (spot on) expectation on the future trajectory of console pricing, and the one-foot-in nature of PSVR2 vs what you can do (for a price) with PCVR. Between that and the PC handhelds being the GameBoy I always wanted, I made the jump.

Im sorry man, but this kinda reads like you do care. It comes across like youre overexplaining a lot about how happy you are Microsoft didnt do it. I bet you if Microsoft did come out with a Pro version, you'd be all over it.

Also, the main point of the PS5 Pro isnt to play last years games. Its for the upcoming 4 years worth of games.

And if Digital Foundry pixel peeping doesnt impress you, i hate to break it to you but "next gen" isnt gonna be a whole lot better. People need to stop expecting PS1 to PS2 levels of graphical difference between generations.

I pre-ordered one. I'm a tech geek, but I definitely didn't need a PS5 Pro. Just wanted one. Had no problem getting one. Just went on PS Direct and they still have them available so I believe the price ruined it for a lot of potential buyers.

Even if you don't like pro consoles, for backwards compatible it's always better to have a pro console. If you play PS5 games on the PS6, it will run those games better because it's using the PS5 pro version. For me personally the pro console is a huge plus. The PS6 is probably coming end of 2028. 8 year cycle. Pretty long but I like that because devs these days have so much work on games. It's a lot complexer then it used to be. So you can't come out with a total new gen of consoles to fast. So the pro is really nice for hardcore fans,...