PlayStation 5 Pro Review

The hardware does what it promises. Sixty-seven percent more compute units, 28 percent faster memory and a custom ray tracing block roughly triple the intersection throughput of the base machine, while PSSR, Sony's own machine-learning upscaler, lets games hold a 60 fps performance mode without the soft, smeared reconstruction that defined the previous four years. In Horizon Forbidden West or Final Fantasy VII Rebirth the difference is immediate: the shimmer on foliage stops and the choice between resolution and framerate goes away.

The problem is arithmetic. It costs $699. The disc drive is another $79. The vertical stand is $29 on top. That is comfortably over $800 for a console whose library is identical to the cheaper model, delivered through patches whose quality varies by studio, and PSSR itself has shipped visible artefacting in a handful of titles. For a specific buyer with a good display and a low tolerance for image instability, this is a genuinely great box. As a product it is priced for that buyer and nobody else.