Today, Sony officially unveiled the PS5 Pro, a mid-gen refresh of the 2020 PS5 console that boasts some new bells and whistles and a $US700 price tag. During the 9-minute-long technical presentation, system architect Mark Cerny showed us all the new features, from advanced ray tracing to an upgraded GPU, and the upcoming console’s ability to hit higher frame rates at high resolutions. Some gamers are ecstatic that the PS5 Pro (which costs more than any other game console ever has) can produce beautiful graphics at the highly sought after 60fps, but I couldn’t care less.
I just want my console or PC to run my favorite video games without overheating, blowing up, or crashing—I do not give a shit if a leaf in the background of Spider-Man 2 is sharper on the PS5 Pro, and quite frankly, I didn’t see much of a difference during the presentation. I can’t justify spending more on a video game console than I do during a quarterly Botox session, especially when the purported improvements seem barely discernible to the naked eye.
At a certain point in the presentation, Cerny compared the visuals of a variety of games running on both the PS5’s performance mode (which favors frame rates over graphics) and the PS5 Pro. “What we see here is a difference in detail,” Cerny says as a clip shows Ellie from The Last of Us Part II aiming down sights. I caught myself leaning in so close to my monitor my eyes went slightly wonky. The difference in detail? You can kind of read a sign tacked to a tower 50 yards away. Is this going to fundamentally change your gaming experience? Will the ability to read the warning on a watchtower help me better understand the dangers of contributing to a cycle of violence? I don’t think so.
“My favorite is the parade scene from Ratchet & Clank,” Cerny says, showing another side-by-side comparison of the PS5 in performance mode versus the PS5 Pro. “Distant details are much clearer.” The camera zooms in on the crowd of aliens populating the stands in the background of the scene, and though they are definitely sharper and more in-focus on the PS5 Pro, I once again ask: Does this matter? If I was in the midst of playing through this moment, would I stop to wonder at the fidelity of a bug-eyed alien waving in the stands?
There are some gamers who are frame rate and fidelity sickos (one of them works at Kotaku, and he goes by Zack Zwiezen), and I guess I can see why the PS5 Pro is their shit. I did let out a quiet “ooo” at a bright yellow car reflecting in the paint of a black car driving next to it in Gran Turismo 7 during the presentation. And for games where frame rates are key and stuttering or input latency can break immersion or even cause you to die or lose, I can wrap my head around why, maybe, you’d be amped to see a game running at 60fps with gorgeous graphics.
But with a $US700 price tag (and no disc drive, you need to fork over an extra $US80 for that) and only slightly discernible differences in terms of graphics and frame rates, I just can’t bring myself to get excited over the PS5 Pro.
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