Is the PS5 Pro a Downgrade?

The PS5 Pro was controversial from the beginning. I think we all had some level of excitement about a fancy mid-generation upgrade to the now 4 year old PS5, but none of us expected that mid-gen upgrade to cost an eye-watering $700. So, this in itself put many people off, but Sony still touted it as a substantially more powerful console than its current offering. As players and media have got their hands on the PS5 Pro though, it hasn’t turned out to be as simple as that. This is where I have to come clean. I’ve betrayed you, and myself. The very first video on this channel is titled “who is going to buy the ps5 pro?”. I was frankly shocked at the price at the time, and I wondered who on earth has that kind of money lying around. But, dear viewer, it turns out that – after selling one of my kidneys on the Belorussian black market – that I was the nincompoop that bought ps5 pro. But, after spending lots of time playing various games on it and reviewing the findings of outlets like Digital Foundry, you might want to keep that money in your pocket, because the PS5 Pro is actually kind of a downgrade. And here’s why.

One of the benefits of the ps5 pro is something called PSSR, which stands for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. It’s a proprietary AI upscaler and basically PlayStation’s equivalent of Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR. For those that don’t know, these are all upscalers that allow a game to be rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled to your monitor or TVs native resolution. The benefit of this is that it saves a heck of a lot of performance, because your PC or console is only actually rendering the game at, say, 1080p, but then it blows the image up to 4K. The downside to this is that while the image generally looks good, it will never be a match for a true 1:1 rendering of that image. So, in simple terms, the PS5 Pro’s PSSR is blowing game resolutions up to 4K, but there’s one question: what about all of the games that are already running at, or near, 4K? And this is where the problems are happening. Before we dive any deeper, let’s look at some examples from tests run by experts. 

Digital Foundry has been looking at Dragon’s Dogma 2 and comparing the PS5 to the PS5 Pro using PSSR. Most notably, the PS5 Pro version has a lot of aliasing and stair stepping on fine edges like grass that can’t be found in the original PS5 version of the game because it doesn’t use PSSR. This is a trend that has become worryingly commonplace with PS5 Pro enhanced games using PSSR, and the likes of Digital Foundry have found this problem in most of the games enhanced for the PS5 Pro, like Alan Wake 2 for example. When I first heard about this issue, I thought that maybe people were being too nitpicky; maybe everyone was just looking for problems. Sadly, I was wrong, and I’ve found myself noticing the issue in games like Dragon Age The Veilguard. To confirm this, Bloober Team even had to reverse the PS5 Pro patch they put out for Silent Hill because this issue was so horrendous on their performance mode. 

Now, to what extent this is a Sony problem versus a problem of developers using PSSR in situations they shouldn’t is up for debate, but the YouTube channel Gaming Tech highlights the issue in a video about the PS5 Pro patch for Avatar Frontiers of Pandora. The image quality in Avatar is noticeably worse on the PS5 Pro because – like many Pro Enhanced games – PSSR is actually rendering the game at a lower resolution than on the PS5. Side note: we’ll look at why in just a bit. You can visibly see than textures aren’t as sharp, and the strange shimmery aliasing rears its ugly head again. 

The PS5 Pro’s problems don’t end there, though. Performance in some cases has even been worse after developers patch their games to be Pro enhanced. This most interesting case has been with Alan Wake 2, which has seen its performance mode dip roughly 5-10 FPS lower than the base PS5. Understandably, people aren’t happy that their shiny new expensive box is giving them LESS performance and WORSE image quality in some cases. But why is this all happening? How can a more powerful console give you less performance? The answer lies in how the developers are utilising the power.

Remember earlier when we talked about how PSSR allows game devs to render their games at lower resolutions and then upscale to 4K? Doing this removes much of the performance burden of rendering that game natively at 4K without upscaling. That gives developers a lot more graphical power to work with to improve other aspects of games, like the much-touted ray tracing. The PS5 Pro’s ray tracing implementation in games like Spider-Man and Gran Turismo has been nothing short of excellent, and those games look much better, but that doesn’t mean all games will. In the examples above, like Avatar, Alan Wake, and Dragon’s Dogma 2, it’s clear that the patches have aimed to cram in as much graphical goodness as possible. Draw distances of features like grass are further, vegetation is thicker, and close-up textures look more defined. But the downside to this is the shimmering you get as you move your camera or approach objects with fine details, like water, grass, or buildings. This is particularly obvious when actually playing the game and not just standing still, because the shimmering is distracting when you move your camera. These graphical enhancements can also take their toll on performance, as we’ve seen with Alan Wake 2, so players are left with a version of the game that simply doesn’t run as well as a 4-year-old console in some cases.

However, the problems are not all about the console’s performance. A simple trip to the PlayStation store will show you a section of all the PS5 Pro enhanced games. Unfortunately, that sections is barely more than a page long and is comprised of just over a dozen GOOD games, as well as some general schlock like Paladin’s Passage, whatever that is. Over a month since launch, this is disappointing, and I can’t help but feel like PS5 Pro support has been worse than the PS4 Pro at launch. The whole launch of the new console feels, in general, more slapdash than the father figures from my childhood.

Is the PS5 Pro worth it?

It’s certainly not all objectively awful when it comes to the PS5 Pro. We’ve seen some developers use PSSR to great effect, and in general terms, textures do look sharper and games have more THINGS added to them over the base PS5. But developers have been slow on the uptake when it comes to actually providing support for their games on the PS5 Pro, especially when we look at games that have already been out for a while. Much of the support we have seen has resulted in them just ticking the “PSSR ON” setting and not really looking at what that will do to the look of their game. You only have to look at Silent Hill 2 before and after the patch to see that PSSR isn’t just a magic bullet that fixes everything. What’s even worse, is that we’re not given any real options on whether to use PS5 Pro patches or not. They just roll out the update and we have to use what we’re given, even if that means tanking performance versus the base ps5 version.

This is all to say that the PS5 Pro is more of a weird sidestep slash downgrade than an actual upgrade. For me, the shimmering issue on many PS5 Pro titles that use PSSR is very distracting, and it definitely detracts from the game experience. The PS4 Pro had a tangible mission statement – it was aimed at those buying the new and sexy 4K HDR TVs. But fast forward a few years and we’ve all still got those TVs, and the PS5 Pro has just kinda plopped onto store shelves – without a disc drive, might I add, and don’t get me starters on scalpers It’s all been a bit underwhelming, especially when you factor in how much this thing costs. Right now, the PS5 Pro has been an overall downgrade for me, but what do you think?

Find out how boring games took over my life here.