On paper, Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro looks like the antidote to all the small flaws in the PlayStation 5 base console experience, but after carefully considering the coverage and real-world performance of the world’s most powerful gaming console, I think I’ll pass for now.
5
I Skipped the PS4 Pro and It Was Fine
This won’t be the first time I skipped on a Sony “Pro” console because this isn’t the first time they’ve made one. In fact, the PlayStation 4 Pro was much more necessary at that time because we were going through a TV format change, moving to 4K.
However, even when I got my first 4K TV in 2016, I didn’t see any reason to upgrade. Frame rates weren’t improving, and I didn’t sit with my eyeballs a foot from the TV, so my 1080p PS4 games still looked pretty much the same as they did on my previous TV. In fact, you could say they looked a little better!
I kept my PS4 until the very day I unboxed my first (of two) PS5 consoles.
4
I Don’t Have Many Complaints About How My PS5’s Graphics Look
It is a fact that many games on the PlayStation 5 sacrifice a lot in their 60fps “performance” modes, with chunky, blurry graphics. At least if you’re sitting close enough to your TV. I try to stay in that optimal six-foot range for my 55-inch TV, which means that I do get annoyed by some games that clearly should not have offered a 60fps mode to begin with. I’m looking at you Square Enix!
However, for the most part, I just get over it, or if it’s not an action game I’ll (reluctantly) play at 30fps instead. If I think of the rigmarole of buying a new $700 console and then having to deal with selling my old one, it stll feels like too much of a hassle for the returns, which is actually much more important in this conversation.
3
Sony’s AI Upscaling Is Still Undercooked
I’d written before that the proprietary AI upscaler in the PlayStation 5 Pro is the only feature that really matters, which is probably the biggest reason I’m giving it a skip. AI upscaling is the technology of this generation, where we can cleverly reconstruct a high-resolution image without the fruitless wastage of rendering a native 4K image.
Terrible upscaling solutions (compared to AI technologies like DLSS) are, in my opinion, the biggest miss for this generation of consoles. Unfortunately, every analysis and result of PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) have been very underwhelming. There are even cases where there’s been a regression in image quality, so clearly there are some bugs to work out.
The good news is that this is something that Sony can keep working on, but my gaming PC just got access to NVIDIA’s latest DLSS Transformer model, which makes Sony’s technology feel yet another generation behind. I hope they keep at it, because if PSSR can reach its full potential, it might swing me the other way.
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The PS5 Pro’s AI Upscaler Is the Only Feature That Really Matters
Everything else is just icing on the cake.
2
I Don’t Want To Buy Into the Detachable Drive
It’s maybe a minor issue in the greater scheme of things, but I loathe Sony’s decision to leave factory-integrated drives out of later versions of their consoles. This means that both the Pro and the Slim models of the PS5 are no longer truly offline devices. You need to connect at least once to pair the drives, which means that should those authentication servers ever turn off, all of these consoles are ewaste unless someone works out a hack for it.
The launch PlayStation can be taken out of the box, turned on and play games from disc without ever being connected to the internet. It’s fundamentally just as offline as every PlayStation that’s come before it. Now, this may come as a surprise to many of you, since who would do that? However, if you visit a site like Does It Play? you can see a database of PlayStation 5 games that can be played offline with no issue on any PS5 with a disc drive.
I don’t mind the additional price of the the disc drive or giving people the option to have a drive or not. I even like the idea that you can replace a faulty drive easily without having to send the whole console in. I just can’t support the idea of a disc drive that needs online activation to work. There has to be a secure offline alternative.
1
There Are No Games That Compel a Need To Upgrade (Yet)
The promise of the PlayStation 5 Pro is to deliver the 30fps 4K visuals of the base PS5 at the 60fps frame rate of its performance mode. If it actually did that across the board and consistently, I’d be much more eager for one.
Perhaps more importantly, there have yet to be games where the Pro version is so clearly superior that I feel I need to buy the hardware. That might change, however. As the PS5 generation marches on, and later generation games really push the base console too hard, I might feel like I need to upgrade. Then again, if PS5 games keep releasing on PC, I might just invest that money towards a new PC instead. We sure live in interesting times!
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