My Exclusive PlayStation 5 Pro Demo: What $700 Gets You, and Why It Matters
I'm here at Playstation headquarters with an exclusive hands on of Sony's brand new Playstation five Pro console that's coming out in November. Yes, I got to play a bunch of games on it. Here's what's going on. It's been four years since Sony released the Playstation five, which went by pretty fast in the middle of a pandemic. But the idea of next generation kind of lingers in my head and probably for a lot of people. When do you buy a console? Well, Sony has had midrange console upgrades in the past, the Playstation Four Pro came out three after the Playstation four and lo and behold, the Playstation five Pro is coming out four years after the Playstation five for 699. You're paying more but not too much tremendously more compared to the Playstation five that is already on the market and has an upgraded slimmer version compared side by side. It's also not that much larger. In fact, it's a little bit smaller than the Playstation five original, which is a nice surprise because the Playstation four Pro was definitely bigger and thicker what you get. Well, there's no optical drive, you have to buy that separately, you can use the same optical drive that's available on the slim model and pop it in. And also it may be that a lot of people choose to prefer the digital version. Now considering that there's also Wi Fi seven and the size of the drive is now bumped up to two terabytes, which is the same speed as the SSD in the previous models, same CPU too. But the GP U is a lot beefier. So it to be 67% more powerful and 38% faster. And it's going to provide better performance for all the games and a lot more things like ray tracing. There's also a big focus on upgrading the resolution of existing games playstation spectral super resolution is the technology that uses an A I neural upscaling using a convolutional neural network to basically just make sure the games play really nicely in four K. And speaking of four K, existing playstation five games, they always had two modes which was either 1080 P, 60 frames per second or four K at 30 frames per second. Sony is now offering a pro mode that glues both of those together. And so you're getting both 60 frames per second and four K. Now, that's exactly what I would have wanted to play in the first place if you're interested in doing things like eight K gaming or you want to do things like 120 frames per second there are capabilities for games to do that, but those are gonna be on a game by game basis. The real push here is for really nice four K 60 frames per second across the board for your entire library. What does this mean for the future of playstation? I got to talk to Mark Cerny, lead systems architect for playstation and Hideaki, Nishino San CEO of platform for Sony interactive entertainment. They talked about how in a lot of ways PC gaming right now is providing a kind of an on ramp for some of these technologies, but also allowing Sony to lead a bit with some things like ray tracing where they're using an A MD developed rate tracing technology that isn't even in existing GP US, some of that will kind of ride ahead and other things like maybe more advanced graphics that you might be used to on P CS will finally have a chance to come over to playstation Five Pro and as a lot of games now are increasingly cross platform and Sony's games live on P CS, you'll probably see much more of that cross pollination. Clearly, a fidelity push for people who may have really big TV S or really big A V lovers and want something that either looks the best it can be or runs really smoothly on the big screens that I played on. Um You can definitely see the difference but if you're a Playstation five owner, I think you could also be fine continuing to play the Playstation five. They're gonna be about 50 games that come out at launch with upgrades specifically for the PS Five Pro. Now, while a lot of them will involve the introduction of this new Pro mode that will be able to run at a smooth 60 frames per second and four K performance. There are gonna be others that do other things. It could be graphic upgrades to the environment, more people in the environment. So that's a console. Let's go play the games. This is uh Sony's Playstation demo room where I got to try out the Playstation Five Pro and a bunch of games in two different setups. The first one got to play on two different monitors, checking out a whole bunch of games on the Playstation five and then the Playstation Five Pro uh looking at the two different uh play modes, fidelity and performance on the five and then the pro mode on the Playstation Five Pro, that's uh Horizon, Forbidden West. And then I got to play a few games on a big 80 inch screen including Gran Turismo seven, which has an A K mode or alternately one with ray tracing turned on, which is what I've got right here. I mean, this is obviously the version I would wanna play. It is the reflections in ray tracing are beautiful. I got really into playing ratchet and Clank Rift apart and I love games like this. Um, what's really fun is that it's just such a fast game and I feel like the, the pro makes it feel faster. So I'm grabbing one controller that's connected to a PS Five playing on a PS five for a bit and then I would jump back and forth between that and a PS Five Pro to see what it's like. This is the, um, the four K 30 frames per second version of uh Horizon Forbidden West, which I'm, I'm used to and looks really good. Um But what looks even better is playing it, uh four K 60 frames per second on PS Five Pro, which looks buttery smooth and really crisp. So, you know, it is like going back and playing it on the other on the 30 frames. It's kind of hard to do. Um because this looks really nice. Unfortunately, Sony didn't let us do any direct capture of the Playstation Five Pro during our demos at Sony's headquarters and they didn't let us do any close up real extended looks at the gameplay on screen either. But hopefully you can get an understanding of what I'm talking about for when the system debuts on November 7th. What does this mean for the future of next gen gaming? Well, that's hard to tell because we're not maybe fully in next gen gaming yet, but we're getting there by increments, Playstation Five Pro is the hottest of the new gaming technology tech that we've seen and it's adopting some ideas that PC gaming still doesn't have yet. It'll be really interesting to see where games start to evolve and get better along with PS Five Pro graphics, but also where the PS Five Pro ray tracing and all of that tech begins to hint at where technology is going to be headed for PC gaming to come. Not everyone's going to want to upgrade to this. But I'm really curious about what games are going to start looking like on the hardware. We'll find out in November. Thanks for watching.