The PlayStation 5 Pro is here after months of rumor and speculation and a final reveal. And they couldn’t have picked a better time with Black Friday sales due to start soon for PlayStation gamers. I can fill you in on the sales happening in UK, as stores such as Argos have a slight discount on the Pro model. Speaking of important sales, we also saw the launch of the 30th Anniversary Pro bundle today. But be warned: this is a limited edition bundle.
The normal PlayStation 5 Pro comes at the price we expected it to in more stores. But a few questions remain. Are we getting enough bang for our buck? Does it have enough meet on its bones for the premium price? Does it…? Ok, I’ll stop with the analogies. I’ll let you know instead how can you expect a few games to perform on the PS 5 Pro.
PlayStation 5 Pro Enhanced Support – A Look At The Games Taking Advantage Of The New Hardware
I have tested a handful of games so let’s look at a few of them.
Horizon Forbidden West
The game modes are now Performance Pro and Fidelity Pro. This is what IGN had to say about it:
Horizon Forbidden West showcases another interesting implementation of PS5 Pro enhancements. Like on the base PS5, it has three options – “Favor Graphics,” “Balanced,” and “Favor Performance.” Again, the performance-based mode is the way to go since it hits a stable 60fps while, in some respects, looking even better than the base PS5’s graphics-priority mode. You get finer details in foliage, better lighting, and a better resolution rendering technique. Especially for a game like Horizon Forbidden West, those extra frames make the gameplay experience so much better and you can still enjoy the lush vistas with that added clarity and detail. The PS5 Pro’s graphics priority option, on the other hand, caps the game at 30fps but pushes the boundaries with a higher base resolution and further enhanced effects, yet I don’t find the trade-off worth it since it’s tough to distinguish with the fantastic Pro performance mode. The curious part is the “Balanced” option, which goes for 40fps and strikes a middle ground with visual quality, but honestly, it’s not worth the cut in frame rate for marginal visual gains.
However, the game only displays the Resolution and Performance Pro modes on my end. It looks and plays fine on either of them. The main change is a faster and smoother framerate in performance mode with slightly lower fidelity settings.
Hogwarts Legacy
I tested this one out by playing on a base PlayStation 5 and then switching to the Pro. I saw improvements both in stability and visual appearance. The game offers three modes on the Pro:
- Fidelity: A high-fidelity rendering mode favoring resolution and graphical quality.
- Fidelity With Raytracing: A higher-fidelity rendering mode featuring Raytracing.
- Performance: A high-framerate mode favoring performance.
I tested the game on the Fidelity With Raytracing mode and the quality stood for itself.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
This one features two modes: Performance Pro and Fidelity Pro. This is what IGN reported about the two:
On PS5 Pro, you get to choose between “Fidelity Pro” and “Performance Pro” modes. The latter offers visual quality that’s identical to the base PS5’s Fidelity mode, with all the original ray tracing features intact while maintaining a smooth 60fps – effectively the best of both worlds when compared to the PS5’s modes. However, with the Fidelity Pro option, Insomniac cranked the knobs even further, putting features like ray-traced ambient occlusion, key light shadows, and further-improved reflections on the table – but all those upgrades come at the cost of again being chained down to 30fps
Now let’s get to how things went on my end. First off let’s discuss the Performance option. I last played this it was on the Fidelity mode and the difference that mode has on the Pro is very different. The extra increase in framerate is night and day and I jumped from performance to fidelity to test both. The visual quality is extremely high and maybe a bit clearer than we saw on the base console. However, switching to Fidelity sprung differences in the ray-traced visuals. I could say these are negligible, since you really need to stop and take them in. There is more detail in the visual quality. But this comes at the expense of a 30 FPS gameplay experience. You can toggle visual settings from High to Medium, as well.
Final Thoughts
The PS 5 Pro is undoubtedly an impressive piece of hardware from the very moment you take it out of the box. However, quality doesn’t come cheap. And if you’re a physical collector, you’ll find it hard to get the hang of the optional UHD drive from the Slim models – stock is pretty much nonexistent at the moment. You’ll also need the stand from the Slim model for it.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you if the game improvements are worth the extra buck. I simply enjoy having the best experience with games, and this hasn’t changed in the 40+ years I’ve been a gamer. So shut up and take my money, Sony!
Leave a Reply