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After years of speculation, Sony finally took the wraps off the PlayStation 5 Pro last week. The revamped game console looks much like its predecessor, but it has more stripes. Naturally, that means it’s faster, but how much faster? A new analysis of the machine reveals that despite the faster hardware, most of the improvements for PS5 Pro will come from image upscaling, and frame rates might not improve at all in some games.
The PS5 Pro has what Sony likes to call the “Big 3” upgrades, including a faster GPU, better ray tracing, and AI-driven upscaling. The GPU offers up to 45% faster rendering with a 28% RAM boost. The newly enhanced ray tracing system can calculate rays at double or triple the speed of the regular PS5, but the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) may be the biggest upgrade. Sony claims PSSR can analyze a game “pixel by pixel” to upscale a 1080p image to 4K.
No one has gotten their hands on the PlayStation 5 Pro yet, but the graphics experts at Digital Foundry have gone over the game footage in excruciating detail. Following the announcement, Sony has provided a ProRes file that shows what the PlayStation 5 Pro can do better than the compressed YouTube stream. The Digital Foundry team breaks it down game by game, including The Last of Us Part 2, Horizon Forbidden West, Hogwarts Legacy, and more.
The result is a nearly two-hour analysis of PS5 Pro graphics, which you can watch below. As for whether or not you should, that depends on if you’re thinking about dropping a staggering $700 on the console. If you plan to upgrade, maybe this will be two hours well spent.
None of the games for which we have demo footage looks dramatically better, but the faster PS5 Pro hardware does provide a little more performance headroom. For example, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart renders at up to 1800p at 60fps, but the similar Quality Mode on the regular PS5 only manages 40fps. Hogwarts Legacy also shows better ray tracing accuracy.
You won’t see many games hitting 4K with rasterized pixels—the PS5 Pro leans heavily on PSSR upscaling. The Last of Us Part 2 sticks with 1440p, the same as the PS5 Performance Mode, but PSSR upscaling makes the edges look a bit sharper. Horizon Forbidden West is in a similar place, relying on PSSR to hit 4K. It does look sharper, but the DF team doesn’t think it looks like crisp native 4K footage. Gran Turismo 7 renders at 1188p in the provided footage, and it’s upscaled to 4K using PSSR. However, the ray tracing is only rendered at 1080p (quarter resolution), which makes some reflections look a bit odd. While Nvidia DLSS has ray reconstruction for upscaling, Sony didn’t mention any comparable tech in PSSR.
If this early analysis hasn’t turned you off, the PlayStation 5 Pro will launch Nov. 7 at $699. Pre-orders should be live at various retailers starting on Sept. 26.