The idea of a “Mid-Gen Refresh” for videogame consoles is still very much in its infancy, and with absolutely no idea what the next generation of hardware is going to look like (or when it will happen), I’m having difficulty labeling it a “trend” either. Microsoft does not seem to have much interest in a Series X…X(?) as a follow-up to the XBox One X, so Sony seem like the only ones crazy enough to consider such a thing as even necessary.
…And that leads me to the very best thing about the PlayStation 5 Pro — it is completely unnecessary. That may sound a bit weird coming from someone who just bought one and really likes it, but hear me out.
When the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X came out, they were upgrades to severely underpowered consoles that barely could run modern games at 1080p and 30FPS. Furthermore, the games didn’t look particularly great for people that had 4K displays, which became the standard resolution for televisions between the launch of the original PS4/XBox One and Pro models . Our first round of “Pro” consoles last generation were substantial upgrades to consoles that desperately needed them.
The current PlayStation 5 does not have that problem. There’s really only a handful of games I’ve played this entire generation where the question of “would this benefit from a pro console?” even came up in my head. The vast majority of big titles have very few issues running modern AAA games at a high resolution and a locked/nearly locked 60FPS. While I don’t feel this current generation of hardware had the graphical “wow” factor of what one would hope for from new consoles, the true leap forward for the PS5/Series X has been optimal performance delivered faster than ever before with SSD backed loading. Because of that, any “Pro” console is going to run into the law of diminishing returns. Do games look better on the PS5 Pro? Yes, absolutely they do. “Should you buy one?” is another matter entirely.
Prologue: From purchase through initial setup
The actual act of acquiring my launch day PlayStation 5 Pro was significantly less difficult than anticipated. I guess I’m too traumatized from playing this stupid little game with retailers for the last twenty years to know how to handle myself when it’s easy to get a console. I figured I would be fighting with a literal army of resale bots, but I was able to secure a pre-order from PlayStation Direct the morning they became available. If I knew demand wouldn’t be through the roof and I could’ve got one on Amazon at basically any point over the last month, I wouldn’t have bothered.
While the console itself has been easy to get, the optional disc drive attachment has been experiencing shortages and second-hand markups, currently averaging around $140 on eBay as of this writing compared to the MSRP of $79.99. Fortunately my paranoia paid off here, as I ordered one off of Amazon the same day I got my pre-order in. In the same order, I also picked up the far more infuriating vertical stand (more on that later) and a 1TB SSD expansion.
These additions meant that I got to play “Construct My First Gaming PC” before I could plug in my shiny new PS5 Pro, as assembly is now a part of the home console experience. Installing the optical drive and the SSD expansion is, literally and figuratively, a snap, but it’s a bit too much of a snap as the pressure exerted and sound made when prying open the side panels were both equally worrisome. Luckily that’s the sort of thing one will only have to do one time, and once installed, both the disc drive and the SSD were recognized upon initial setup and worked out of the gate.
Once I installed the vertical stand, it was finally time to look at this monstrosity of consumerism on my game den floor, and I was immediately reminded of how much I hate the look of my launch PlayStation 5. It’s gaudy, it’s obtuse, and it looks like what people in the ’60s thought things in 2024 would look like. The bulbous disc drive looks awful and makes sitting it horizontal a huge pain, so its aesthetic affects practicality in a negative way. Moving it to a new location is a pain, and I’d be terrified of having it in luggage, fearing its little white elf ears would get caught on something. This sort of thing doesn’t bother me usually, but when my entire gaming area is a sea of black consoles, black furniture, a black mini fridge, black speakers, and a black TV, this bright white spaceship thing sticks out.
The good news is that the PS5 Pro does look a bit better. It’s still very much in line with the overall design ethos, but it’s significantly less bulky overall. The vents on the side of the Pro add to the sleekness, but also aren’t actually vents to anything and serve no functional purpose. Overall I’m tempted to call it a good looking console, and that is true until one chooses to install the optional disc drive, which somehow sticks out even more than it did at launch. When put on the vertical stand, it’s no longer centered and doesn’t quite look right. While it does look better than my launch PS5, “I hate looking at it slightly less” is hardly a ringing endorsement.
Unfortunately, the first night involved very little playing of videogames, as my OCD self wanted everything transferred, updated, downloaded, and synced over from my previous PS5. This was easy to do but rather time consuming, particularly the 1TB of games transferred over from my external HDD which took about three hours. Downloading my entire library of save data from the cloud using PlayStation Plus was simple, and by the end of the evening I had a shiny new version of my old console.
At some point I did play the games, and I am, for the most part, thrilled with the results. I see the PlayStation 5 Pro as a fantastic bit of hardware well positioned to be my primary gaming device for the next 4-5 years. I also think the vast majority of people reading this shouldn’t even remotely consider purchasing one. For those curious if they are in the small minority of players who will objectively love this thing, I have created the following questionnaire. Simply answer the following three questions, and anyone who selects “No” to even one of them can easily assume the PlayStation 5 Pro isn’t for them. However, for those who say “Yes” to all three questions, not only should they buy one, but I’d say they should do so with confidence they are making a wise investment.
#1: Do you have the money for it?
In the capitalist hellscape we currently reside in, the concept of “value” differs widely depending on one’s own economic outlook. $699.99 (or an eye watering €799.99 in Europe) is certainly a jump, there’s no getting around it. That’s a rent payment for a lot of us, and if at any point one is pondering the potential financial implications of purchasing a videogame console, then that person should be happy to hear that the current iteration of the Playstation 5 will continue to serve them well. We do not need the PS5 Pro the same way that we frankly needed the PS4 Pro, and that helps the PS5 Pro exist as its own separate entity without being a perceived necessity. When one needs something compared to merely coveting it, value becomes a significantly different conversation.
The PlayStation 5 Pro is a vanity item. It’s priced like one, and it’s targeting a high-end market populated by those who value a premium gaming experience. With that said, a $700 console isn’t what I bought — I bought an $895 console.
I have around 100 PS4 and PS5 discs on-hand, so that $80 disc drive was a mandatory purchase. $80 is cheaper than the current $100 jump between PS5 Slim consoles with or without disc drives, and it’s pretty easy to install. Personally I don’t see a huge problem with this approach towards consumers who want to own discs, but it would have been nice if they made enough disc drives to meet demand.
On the other hand, I continue to be rather ticked off over the $30 I spent on the cheap vertical stand. My launch unit came with a stand, and when Sony is already pricing this thing questionably, nickel & diming their most loyal customers over a metal ring, a plastic plate, and a cheap plastic screw that stripped during installation feels highly unnecessary.
One place where Sony did add considerable value is in storage capacity. While PS5 Slim owners got a full 1TB of storage, launch users got a meager 825GB of SSD storage, and only about 667GB was actually accessible after initial setup. The Pro bumps that up to a full 2TB with 1.85 available to players, which marks a nearly 250% increase from my original capabilities. So did I need to throw in another 1TB expansion SSD drive for $85? Probably not, but I do live under a data cap, so I like having my games installed.
Also, that $895 figure becomes even more suspect if, like me, one is upgrading from an old PS5 to a new one. I tend to keep my consoles in good condition and store the boxes, so when it came time to upgrade to the Pro, I knew I could sell my launch unit pretty easily. I did this a few weeks ago to get ahead of the flood of used PS5’s from other people upgrading to the Pro, and I was able to snag $340 for my dusty old launch unit with a meager 500GB SSD expansion. With that done, the total cost of upgrading to a PlayStation 5 Pro came out to be $555, which feels far more reasonable to my wallet and personal financial situation. That said, mileage will definitely vary here.
#2: Are you really going to notice the difference?
It’s here where the actual personal value proposition of owning a PlayStation 5 Pro comes in, as the initial cost of the console itself is only the start of the financial questions that abound when looking to get the most out of this hardware.
To really notice the legitimate technological leaps the PS5 Pro makes, one needs a quality television, a good sound system, and an optimal viewing angle. One can have a top-of-the-line display, but if they’re sitting too close or too far away from it, picking up on the raytraced reflections and other bells & whistles the pro offers will be difficult. I have a 55” Samsung S90C OLED with just about every gaming centric feature one would want from a modern TV, and I’m sitting directly in front of it from about 70” away, which is the optimal viewing distance according to some chart a guy in a Discord chat showed me. This combination actually allows me to (theoretically) see and feel a noticeable difference in quality using the PlayStation 5 Pro.
Having a great TV at an optimal viewing distance is, in my eyes, critical to truly getting the most out of the experience Sony is pitching with the PS5 Pro, and achieving that is a hell of a lot more than $700. My OLED was a factory refurbished model and on deep discount at $1065, and that doesn’t even get into the financial issue of having a living space where one also has the space to have a designated “Game Den”. Optimizing viewing distance is not a luxury most people have. I also have a decent 7.2.2 sound system, and as someone who sees that as one of the bigger benefits to console gaming compared to PC, I’d throw that in as a necessity to maximizing enjoyment of the PS5 Pro.
For those with that kind of setup, the PlayStation 5 Pro does create a discernible difference in graphical fidelity. There’s 80 or so “PS5 Pro Enhanced” games out now, I have access to about a dozen of them, and I’ve put some time into maybe six of those games. There’s a lot of variance to what each game offers, but to put it as simply as possible, PS5 Pro offers you either quality modes with improved framerates or performance modes with increased fidelity, depending on however one wants to view the fluid in that glass.
Practically, the vast majority of us seem to prioritize framerate and thus usually don’t see a lot of the graphical ballyhoo these new machines are capable of performing. Ray tracing on the base PS5 at a stable 60fps has proven to be difficult, so there’s a good chance someone only looking to prioritize performance hasn’t seen actual ray tracing in four years of PS5 ownership. With the Pro, we now have the ability to see the graphical performance boost we wanted from the start of the console generation with the 60FPS performance that has now become the desired standard across all platforms and genres.
I didn’t get much of a chance to play some of the more notable Pro Enhanced games. The showstopper is apparently Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and I’m sure it looks exceptional, but I already finished that game and don’t wanna be bothered downloading all 110 Gigs of it again only to play it for five minutes and agree that it’s real purdy. The exact same thing could be said for Demon’s Souls — another early standout apparently, but, again, I beat that game four months ago so I’m not in a rush.
The game that did get the most attention was Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered, which is a game I’ve now thrice bought some part of. The Pro Performance mode is truly dazzling to see, and the devs clearly did a lot of work getting the original title up to the graphical standards of the second. I was very happy to cross this one off the backlog, and the PS5 Pro is the best way to do so.
Of the other games I had access to, I prioritized those I legitimately wished to get back to, so the majority of my time on the PS5 Pro has been focused on Rise of the Ronin and Stellar Blade.
Rise of the Ronin is exactly what I described previously, as its performance mode has shown significant improvement in resolution, effects, and overall stability. That game had a lot of stutter during most of my time with it, and that has been eliminated here. Stellar Blade did a better job at launch of keeping the framerate steady, but it varied the resolution and scaled back draw distance wildly to get there. With the new “Pro Mode”, the resolution is overall much higher than in the base performance mode, and players with a high refresh rate display and VRR can run this mode at 80FPS without losing anything.
These are nice jumps for sure, and said jumps were also very easily noticeable to my eye as someone who put plenty of time into these games before the Pro released, but are these massive, foundation altering jumps? Absolutely not. Furthermore, I do often find myself pondering “is the PS5 Pro making this look so good, or is my OLED making this look so good?” I’m sure it’s a mixture of both, but that being true doesn’t speak well for the Pro. The jump here is nowhere what it was for 4KTV owners going from a PS4 to a PS4 Pro, but I think that speaks to the quality of the base PS5 hardware more than anything.
We also have had an assortment of titles that actually looked worse post PS5 Pro patch, and it seems we may be learning in real time the limitations of the Playstation Spectral Super Resolution (or the wonderfully abbreviated PSSR if you so choose) AI Upscaling available to PS5 Pro developers. Silent Hill 2’s Pro Patch amounted to just turning PSSR on, and not noticing the incredible amount of flickering it produced. A similar story can be seen in titles like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but it seems like the more glaring omissions have been patched since then.
Frankly, one should know already if the technical deficiencies outlined are the sorts of things that bother them to a point where upgrading hardware is a valid consideration. I absolutely adore the content of the team at Digital Foundry, and I have learned a lot about the technical aspect of games from them, but I also think they’ve given us all some level of graphical snobbery that console players in particular have never cared about. DF has trained us to be acutely aware of technical deficiencies that, in previous generations, would’ve been perfectly acceptable.
Enjoyment of the Playstation 5 Pro is directly tied to how much these very pleasant, intelligent, pale men have infected one’s brain. I cannot sit here and say the Pro is a revolution in graphical fidelity, and the vast majority of players aren’t going to notice a discernible difference. I might be impressed with it, but none of my non-techdork friends will be.
#3: Do you primarily play videogames on home consoles out of personal preference?
Alright, those who have made it thus far both believe they can tell the difference and think they got the scratch for it. The only question left is if it will get proper usage?
We live in a time where it’s never been easier to play more games than ever on a litany of different devices, and very few of them have ever appealed to me. At the end of the day, I want to play videogames sitting on a sofa in front of a big TV with a surround sound system filling the room. That’s the main way I’ve consumed videogames for basically my entire life. I don’t want to do it at a desk, and I’d rather be reading or listening to a podcast while traveling, so I don’t want to play games on the go either.
For those of us who prefer to consume videogames this way, the PS5 Pro offers a rare opportunity to truly play games at the cutting edge of modern graphical fidelity in a way no console has. Could we get this experience with a PC? Sure, but it’ll cost significantly more money. Based on my research, building a PS5 Pro equivalent PC would cost around $1000-1200. Granted, one can do significantly more with a fully functional PC than they can with a game console, but consoles provide a convenience that still can’t be touched by a PC. Yes, using consoles has become significantly more PC-like with digital storefronts and software updates, but it’s still a far smoother experience.
Some people don’t mind hauling their gaming laptop or tower to their living room, plugging it into their TV, changing the display resolution to match their TV, using a bluetooth keyboard to use their computer from their couch, resyncing their XBox controller to their PC after playing earlier on Series X, then rebooting a game because the audio was outputting from the laptop and not from the TV’s sound system, along with a modicum of other minor headaches. I suppose I could have a designated gaming tower hooked up to my TV, but that’s a level of opulence that would make a Playstation 5 Pro owner like myself blush.
For players who still prefer games on a designated videogame console, this is the most technically proficient way to do so ever. It is the closest I have ever felt that a console is providing a truly cutting-edge graphical experience on par with high-end gaming PC’s. As someone who has seen that level of smoothness and fidelity on occasion but never really wanted to be bothered to fuss around with PC hardware, the PS5 Pro lets me experience that level of performance in a convenient, familiar way. That’s worth something.
Verdict
It’s weird to like something so much when I can barely recommend it to a sliver of the overall gaming populace. For parents looking to buy their kids a game console, the PlayStation 5 Pro is supremely unnecessary. Students looking to play something on a small screen with headphones at a desk in their dorms should also avoid the PS5 Pro. I wouldn’t recommend it to people with merely decent televisions, I wouldn’t recommend it to people who sit at less-than-optimal viewing positions to their televisions, and I wouldn’t recommend it to people only looking to play videogames once in a while. PC gamers who already have the ability to play the latest and greatest will find very little appealing here either. Anyone who currently is satisfied with the performance of their current PlayStation 5 need not apply, and anyone actually fretting over a $700 price point also need not apply.
The only person I’d recommend the Playstation 5 to is… well… me.
For readers who find themself in my very specific category, I actually think there’s a lot to like here. If the extra $200 (…or $395) is within one’s gaming budget, if one primarily plays games on consoles and prefers that experience of game delivery, and if one has the proper display necessary to actually see the difference, I’d almost call this thing a must-buy. There is a discernible difference in games that are Pro Enhanced (to a trained eye) and that will only increase in the future. In the coming years, the gap in what the Pro can do compared to what the base model can will only widen as more games push the technical boundaries of what both can accomplish.
The console gaming market is large enough to offer a premium product that is not meant for every user, and I feel Sony has been upfront with the capabilities and expectations for this new hardware. It does what it sets out to do, and while I’m still perturbed by what I paid for it, I’m only slightly perturbed. I’m excited to use this as my primary gaming platform for the next few years.
RATING: 8.0 Out Of 10
He is currently attending graduate school at Pacific University seeking a Master's In Teaching with a focus on secondary social studies. From 2015-2020, Jarrod worked as a school teacher in various countries throughout Asia, and is now seeking certification to teach in his home country so a global pandemic doesn't leave him stranded again.
- The PlayStation 5 Pro Difference: The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered - May 8, 2025
- Jarrod’s 2024 Top Ten Games of the Year and Other Meaningless Awards - February 26, 2025
- The Three Part Questionnaire: A PS5 Pro Review - December 29, 2024
Awesome writeup! I’m thinking of getting us a PS5 for Xmas & you’ve convinced me we don’t need a Pro (unlike the last-gen improved versions that we picked up for not much more than the base versions).