The PlayStation 5 Pro has officially launched, giving us a more powerful version of the current-gen console which not many people asked for. During the announcement of the half-step console, viewers were struggling to see the difference between images of games played on the base console and the pro.
Costing $700, the PS5 Pro comes without a disc drive, which needs to be bought separately, and did not launch with any new games alongside it. However, 55 games have been enhanced to take full advantage of its tech. Besides that, and the cool sports stripe, the console also includes a new welcome tab theme.
New Console, New Theme
The new welcome theme follows the same design philosophy of the base PS5 UI, but changes things around a bit. The welcome tab is altogether new, and features an eye-catching background. As spotted by VGC, it’s an artistically stylized shot of the internal components of the console.
As for what these internal components are, the PS5 Pro features PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, or PSSR, which is a proprietary machine-learning technology that will add clarity to images by adding details to it. Aside from that, the console offers advanced ray tracing and smooth framerates at 60hz or 120hz.
While there was initially some debate about whether the PS5 would have received a half-step console, it turns out that the PS5 Pro was always on the cards. In a recent interview, PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino mentioned that the team “started working on PS5 Pro even before PS5 (launched).” But he also mentioned that unlike smartphones and gaming PCs, putting out a console annually is not viable.
Despite all of this though, it appears that the PS5 Pro, with all its advanced tech, cannot run Elden Ring at 60fps. Digital Foundry performed an experiment to see how the console would run the beloved game. However, despite featuring three different modes, including a performance mode, the half-step console couldn’t make FromSoftware’s blockbuster title run consistently at 60fps.
It seems that despite running better on the PS5 Pro’s performance mode, the game wouldn’t hit 60fps consistently, and featured a “weird assortment of dropped frames.
PlayStation 5 Pro
The PS5 Pro is the mid-gen upgrade for PlayStation’s PS5. While its design is almost identical to that of the slimmer model of a regular PS5, the Pro promises to improve the visuals of lots of key games and also has a 2TB SSD, doubling the storage space of a regular PS5.