PS5 and PS5 Pro — and I want to see what’s changed. Are there enough Pro-enhanced games now to make it actually worth buying?
Impressions and Launch Thoughts
The Pro wasn’t worth buying for most of us, and I still stand by that — although it really comes down to whether the games you’re actually playing have had a worthwhile upgrade on the Pro.
Price, Value & Availability
Paying £699 for the PS5 Pro at launch did sting a little bit. I mean, my PS5 was working just fine, and I definitely didn’t go for one of the hard-to-find, scalped, overpriced disc drives.
Fortunately, the prices are a bit more reasonable now.
In fact, you can get a PS5 Pro for maybe 5% off at most retailers compared to the launch price. Also, you can buy a disc drive from Sony at £70 — and it’s available. So things have got better in terms of availability.
The Point of the Upgrade
The whole point was to know that I was playing the best version of this game on PlayStation. I’m not missing out, even if it’s just a bump to the resolution.
It also feels like it will be more future-proof for getting the best experience in games like GTA 6 and Battlefield 6.
More Pro-Enhanced Games Now
The good news, if you did wait to get a Pro, is that they’ve nearly doubled the amount of Pro-enhanced games. There were around 50 at launch.
A Few Frustrations
What does kind of frustrate me though, well, is a couple of things:
The PS5 Pro-enhanced games on the PlayStation Store just say “PS5 Pro enhanced.” It doesn’t say what it does.
As we’ll come to in a second with my side-by-side tests — it varies wildly.
I wish PlayStation or developers were just forced to be clearer about what the upgrades actually were per game.
Still Dealing with Mode Choices
I think we were all kind of expecting the PS5 Pro to take away that decision between a quality and a performance mode — lump them together to give you the best console experience. But that’s not what’s really happened. We still have performance. We still have quality. And we have even more modes in some games like Spider-Man.
We kind of just have the same decision to make again — but with different kinds of RT levels and performance frame rates. It’s not made things any simpler. In some games, the improvements can be so slight — without seeing them side by side right up to the screen — it’s hard to see much of a difference at all.
PS5 Pro Performance & Specs
But hold your horse armor — we’ll get to that. Because honestly, the PS5 Pro is not bad for money versus the regular PS5. It’s 60% more expensive, but you’re getting:
- 62% more graphics power (especially with RT or ray tracing)
- 67% extra compute units
- 28% faster RAM
Adding up to give us up to 45% faster rendering performance on the Pro.
You’ve got their PSSR AI upscaling, which is exclusive to the Pro and gets better over time. Plus, you get 2 TB as standard with the Pro — up from about 800 gigs of usable space on the regular PS5.
So if you’re going to upgrade your hard drive anyway — which you probably would, because 800 gigs is not that much on the PS5 — that kind of offsets the price a little bit of the Pro.
Cost Comparison
Certainly, it is still expensive. If you trade in your PS5 — I looked on Sony’s website — they were giving me about £250 for my PS5. That’s only covering about a third of the price up to a Pro with a disc drive.
But without question, compared to a desktop PC build, this is very good value. And don’t even get me started on the value for money of the Nvidia 50 series cards.
Console vs PC Flexibility
The thing is though, unlike a gaming PC, you can’t really adjust the settings much beyond just the performance or quality modes. It’s up to the devs to give us worthwhile Pro upgrades in the games that you actually play.
What About PSVR 2?
PSVR 2 is still a very good VR headset and actually quite good value now that it’s really come down in price. Using this with the Pro — particularly with its PSSR upscaling — can make a meaningful difference to how nice this is to use, the gaming experience.
The trouble is, there just haven’t really been any new first-party games for a while. Sony keeps shutting down VR studios. And while there are some third-party games that are coming out, a lot of them are available on the Meta Quest as well.
But if you did buy one of these and you do want to use it more regularly, then yes — the Pro will make a difference as well.
It’s not something I’ve really been able to test myself, but I will leave a great video linked in my description below where you can find out more about this with the Pro.
What About the PlayStation 6?
But what about the PlayStation 6? I mean, obviously it’s coming. But the best estimates are that it’ll be a late 2027 launch. So we’re still talking the best part of two — two and a half years.
Of course, like we’ve seen with this generation — which really has been held back by the Xbox Series S — PS games are also going to be optimized for the PS5 Pro and the PS5.
The rumors are that they have just about completed the SoC (the chip that it’s going to use), so we may start to get more rumors and leaks about the actual performance possibly in the next sort of 6 months or so.
Final Verdict: Is It Worth Upgrading?
But realistically, in tech there’s always something else around the corner. As soon as you get the PS6.
If there’s a game you want to play, if the Pro here makes a meaningful difference to those games — and you’re going to have to look at it on a case-by-case basis because it is not consistent — then yeah, it’s definitely worth buying.
But I would still probably say for most of us, the Pro is not worth buying — especially if you already have a PS5. At least not until GTA 6 and maybe Battlefield 6 come out. Then let’s revisit, see what those upgrades look like.
