There’s been no denying that the last few months have been a rollercoaster for PlayStation. From the slow birth and quick death of Concord, followed by the meteoric rise of their new release “Astro Bot” which boasts an audience score of 94 on MetaCritic. While my hopes weren’t exactly high for the PlayStation 5 Technical Presentation, they weren’t low either. Unfortunately, a variety of reasons catastrophically destroyed those hopes.The presentation wasted no time in unveiling the new console, name-dropping it within the first 15 seconds of the 9 minute showcase before spending the next 3 minutes going over the original PS5’s specifications. This served as a purpose to segue into the improvements that the PS5 Pro offered over its predecessor, which PlayStation’s Consultant “Mark Cerny” labeled as “The Big Three”. Larger GPU
The first of “The Big Three” is the “bigger and better” GPU, which is physically bigger. There are some fancy numbers thrown in the mix, with the PS5 Pro boasting 67% more “Compute Units” (a completely irrelevant figure to your average consumer), and 28% “Faster RAM” culminating in an overall 45% faster rendering time. Which ultimately begs the question; is a better GPU really needed for a console gamer at the current time of the gaming landscape?
Within the last few years, indie games have absolutely skyrocketed in terms of popularity and fanbase. With developers like “Massive Monster” (Cult of The Lamb) and “The Indie Stone” (Project Zomboid) garnering huge cult followings (pun intended) regardless of graphical fidelity. There is very much a demand there for simplicity and satisfying gameplay loops that don’t depend on graphics, which is something continuously ignored by console developers, with a lot of indie developers lucky to get console ports even if they wanted to.
Advanced Ray Tracing
Following up with the second of “The Big Three” is the “Advanced Ray Tracing” capabilities for the PS5 Pro. The general idea of this is to offer realistic lighting and ambience for the player, but “two to three times better than the PS5” which allows for better immersion into the game they're playing. A massive selling point of the original PS5 was the fact that it offered “Ray Tracing”, which at the time was a valid point for the “latest and greatest” console generation. However, this time around, it feels extremely redundant to market it at all. If the PS5 already initially offered Ray Tracing, then why is there a need to simulate lighting “better” at all? Very rarely do I actually notice other gamers praise lighting in video-games this late into the current console generation life-cycle, and overall leaves the term “Ray Tracing” feeling like a marketing buzzword.
PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (or PSSR)
The final “greatest” thing of “The Big Three” is PSSR. PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution for the most part is PlayStation’s equivalent to “DLSS” and “DSR” for a PC, which allows the GPU to run a game at a lower resolution, but then upscale that to look better and help with performance. PlayStation’s version seems to drive home the idea of “AI-Driven Upscaling”, with Mark Cerny explaining that their AI “studies” the game pixel-by-pixel which allows for the backgrounds and environments to be rendered sharper in real-time and boost the resolution of supported games.
The introduction of PSSR makes the previous two selling points feel completely moot and makes it feel like they’re simply there because PlayStation can’t sell a console with “only one upgrade.” With PSSR capabilities, there should no longer be any reason the original PS5 cannot run games at a native 4k60fps resolution. However, it feels like PSSR is the main selling point of this new console and the only reason it warrants it to be called a PS5 “Pro”.
The Gut Punch
Reaching towards the end of the presentation, PlayStation showcases the “upgrades” that the new console gives by taking us through a few side-by-side gameplay comparisons of the PS5 and the Pro, before ultimately settling on the “gut punch” for both general consumers and physical media preservers.
The first in the list is the absolutely eye-watering price point of the console, which is $699.99 USD or $1,199 AUD, which is simply not justifiable for the minimal upgrades that this console provides.
To top it all off and absolutely make a joke out of physical media preservationist, the PS5 Pro has been confirmed to not be released with a disc drive and can instead be bought separately. I personally am a massive advocate for physical media preservation, and the fact that over the last few years, console developers have moved into a “diskless and digital” era has had my heart break.
In conclusion
In the end, while the idea of the PS5 Pro is a neat one and part of the norm to release an “upgraded” console halfway through its life-cycle, the boosts that it offers seem to not be aimed at your general consumer but rather an enthusiast. Giving credit where it is due, the PS5 Pro seems to be eliminating the "fidelity" and "performance" modes that the original PS5 offered, and instead running titles at 4k60fps straight out of the box as long as they are supported by the PS5 Pro's capabilities. However with the latest buzz that current release games are struggling to reach 4k30fps, I feel that it falls down to a developer optimisation issue and not a hardware limitation one. Previous console generations such as the Xbox 360 and PS3 had developers squeezing out every last drop of hardware power and still delivered fluid experiences, but it seems like developer laziness has just become the norm and spells grim tidings for the future of the landscape.
Comments