Man....what an absolutely fantastic console!
I've downloaded most of my library that has PS5 Pro enhancements and I'm extremely impressed with the upgrade, far moreso than the PS4 Pro. I'm someone who games on a 65" 4K TV and I was always struggling to choose between Performance and Fidelity mode depending on the game. It was always readily apparent to me in many titles that Fidelity modes looked significantly more crisp than the performance modes in most cases. As a result, the more native 4K titles appeared "next gen" to me while the 1440P or less games always looked decidedly cross gen despite being 60 fps.
Games I Played in Fidelity (30 FPS) on Base PS5:
- TLOU1 for instance I played @ 30 fps because of how clear it looked.
- FF7:R is the obvious choice @ 30 fps because the difference is enormous.
- Hogwarts Legacy looked extremely soft to me in performance mode, but was jittery as hell at 30 fps so this was a difficult one to go with, but ultimately settled on Fidelity mode
- Insomniac games tends to have very smooth 30 fps modes so I usually played those at fidelity. Performance always looked quite soft and I could more easily adjust to 30 fps for their titles.
Games I Played in Performance (60 FPS) on Base PS5:
- Demons Souls was a case where Fidelity did look sharper, but Performance looked good and I appreciated 60 fps more. Definitely felt soft.
- Stellar Blade is an action game and really demands 60 fps, but this game can look extremely washed out, blurry, and just unstable at times.
- God of War: Ragnarok just didn't seem to have a huge gap between Perf and Fidelity when it comes to detail.
- Horizon FW I originally played in 30 fps mode due to the launch issues with 60 fps, but after it got patched the fidelity gap wasn't as wide.
After playing all of these games I came away really stunned with the picture quality. Games like Stellar Blade, FF7R, and Hogwarts Legacy are instantly transformed in their performance mode to looking even better than Fidelity does @ 30 fps on the base consoles. These are all games that really struggled in performance mode, looking very soft, unstable, and blurry. PSSR is putting in the work and makes the image look razor sharp with that silky smooth 60 fps framerate.
The benefits of these games that weren't well optimized to begin with is amazing, but equally amazing are the results on the Sony premier games like Horizon, TLOU, God of War, and Spider-Man. The level of detail and smoothness for these games is just insane. I wasn't expecting God of War Ragnarok to look as good as it does, but the new 60fps PRO mode looks vastly superior to the 30 fps fidelity mode. There is so much rich detail on the image that I was just instantly blown away. Textures pop. Long-distance detail pops. Particle effects pop. It looks phenomenal. Same situation for TLOU, HFW, And SM2. I did experiment a bit with the Fidelity PRO modes (Insomniac / Hogwarts), and the Ray Tracing improvements are nice and make for a more dynamic image, but ultimately not worth the tradeoff in performance to me. I suppose I find resolution/image quality to be more important than reflections. So I came away with pretty much selecting the 60 fps PRO modes across the board. Makes the decision easy. Not to say some games don't come along and make me change back to 30 fps, but so far I am very happy sticking with 60 fps.
Overall though I couldn't be happier with the improvements. It brings up all the games to a very high standard, even games that aren't well optimized to begin with. PSSR is truly transformational in what it has the ability to do for many titles going forward, and it feels like it'll be a rare occurrence where a game just doesn't look goddamn crystal clear pleasing and smooth to look at on the PS5 Pro. This will be a great upgrade until next-generation rolls around and really does provide for that Premium console experience. Do I recommend it for everyone? Not if you don't have a large TV or don't sit very close to a smaller TV. The base PS5 looks very good already still. Probably a good way to tell whether you'll benefit from the Pro is if you had the same issues I had deciding between 30 fps and 60 fps games.
Bravo for another masterful console update by Cerny. It's smaller, more appealing to look at, 3x the amount of useable SSD space for games, has less Coil whine, and now my collection of games is being rendered at an extremely high level of fidelity that truly makes use of those 4K displays! Well worth the additional $350 cost to upgrade for me, especially since PS5 is my primary place to play games.
Suprised they call it PS5 when you set it up instead PS5 Pro
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