Digital Foundry’s hands-on preview of the PS5 Pro, with Oliver Mackenzie testing 11 PS5 Pro titles, seeing the new hardware in the flesh and evaluating PSSR.
Following its announcement earlier this month, we’ve had a chance to go hands-on with the PlayStation 5 Pro at a Sony event in San Francisco. With a rapid nine-minute reveal and little additional information made available after the fact, this is our first look at the new hardware, PSSR upscaling and 11 upgraded PS5 Pro titles in the flesh. Going in, the questions were simple: is the premium $699/£699 price point commanded by the PS5 Pro justified? Does the pro console deliver a genuine upgrade in terms of frame-rates, image quality and visual features?
That’s a complicated calculus for sure, but getting to actually sit down and play these PS5 Pro games has made the argument better than the reveal trailer and spec sheet has. In my mind, this is akin to a big graphics card upgrade for a gaming PC – you can suddenly enable new features that you couldn’t before, and you also enjoy a general uptick in performance that makes your existing games more fun to play. This goes double if you primarily played your PS5 games in performance mode when given the option, as you’re keeping the same 60fps update rate in most cases but image quality takes a gigantic step forward – and you may get some new ray tracing features in the bargain.
Before we get into the fundamentals of the value argument, it makes sense to cover the games that we had a chance to play at the three-hour press event. There were some games that felt a bit by-the-numbers in terms of upgrades, but there were also surprising and genuinely exciting demos that best sold the idea of the PS5 Pro.
The first game is not one you might expect: F1 24. Codemasters are continually pushing visual features on the PC version, despite the yearly release cadence, and there is therefore a lot of rendering technology that can be used for the PS5 Pro. The headline here is that the PS5 Pro has enough grunt to deliver a 4K 60Hz quality mode with multiple RT effects – DDGI (dynamic diffuse global illumination, previously seen in the PS5 version), plus RTAO, RT transparency and RT opaque reflections. In the right circumstances, this is an almost generational leap in image quality.
A lot of these improvements come in the form of improved indirect lighting, with a lot of additional lighting detail visible on the PS5 on the shaded streets of mid-afternoon Monaco. Reflections now encompass cars, track-side detail and even transparent surfaces in that track-side detail. This isn’t new – we’ve seen these features on the PC version – but it makes the game look much closer to the F1 broadcast that fans will be familiar with.
The RT mode, as well as delivering all of the RT features from the PC version besides RT shadows, also includes improved anisotropic filtering (AF), which improves the visuals as well. The RT mode isn’t as stable as PS5 on quality mode – likely due to a combination of PSSR limitations and the noise inherent to RT effects – but the trade-off is absolutely worth it.
There’s also a 4K 120fps mode, which sacrifices RT features to maximise image quality and frame-rate. Indeed, this also maximises the HDMI 2.1 standard, and replaces the earlier 1440p 120fps mode.
Finally, the promise made by side of the PS5 box is (kind of) realised: there’s an 8K 60fps mode which pushes image quality to the maximum and still includes DDGI. Interestingly, the 8K mode drops into 8K 30fps for replays and adds on all of the RT features from the PC build, including RT shadows, that don’t appear in the 4K 60fps mode.
The 8K mode isn’t native 8K, but it actually isn’t using PSSR yet – it’s using the Ego Engine’s native TAAU instead. Simon Lumb, a producer at Codemasters, said that they hadn’t gone through too many iterations of their PSSR implementation, but they are looking to include it in the future and they expect that as „it’s tuned to console hardware, it’s going to get better and better over time.“ He also added that „it’s going to go into our engine“, so it ought to make an appearance in future titles.
The next title is another racing game: Gran Turismo 7. Developer Polyphony Digital are a first-party Sony studio, so it’s not surprising to see that the continually-updated GT7 is getting a sizeable PS5 Pro upgrade too. There are two new modes, an RT mode and a image quality priority mode.
The RT mode solves a lot of the issues with the base PS5 implementation, with RT reflections replacing real-time cube maps. That allows for self-reflections, more accurate mirrors, coverage of smaller elements left out of the cube maps, and of course reflections of other cars too. However, GT7 doesn’t go as far as F1 24, as you don’t get things like off-track buildings in the RT reflections. Image quality takes a bit of a hit too, with the native 4K view on base PS5 looking subtantially more stable than the PSSR-upscaled image on PS5 Pro, with its internal resolution of around 1440p in gameplay and 1152p in replays (which are 60fps versus 30fps on base PS5).
The image quality priority mode, on the other hand, outputs at 4K on 4K screens and 8K on 8K screens. PSSR upscaling is used in both cases, with RT reflections dropped.
