My Exclusive PlayStation 5 Pro Demo: What $699 Gets You, And Why It Matters

Intro to the PS5 Pro I'm here at PlayStation headquarters with an exclusive Hands-On of Sony's brand new PlayStation 5 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 4 years since Sony released the PlayStation 5 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 mid-range console upgrades in the past the PlayStation 4 Pro came out 3 years after the PlayStation 4 and lo and behold the PlayStation 5 Pro is coming out 4 years after the PlayStation 5 for $6.99 you're paying more but not too much tremendously more compared to the PlayStation 5 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 5 original which is a nice surprise because the PlayStation 4 Pro was definitely bigger and thicker what do you get PS5 Pro Specs 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 7 and the size of the drive is now bumped up to 2 terabytes which is the same speed as the SSD in the previous models same CPU too but the GPU is a lot beefier supposed to be 67% more powerful and 38% faster and it's going to provide better performance for for all the games and a lot more things like raid tracing there's also a big focus on upgrading the resolution of existing games PlayStation spectral super resolution is the technology that uses an AI neural upscaling using a convolutional neural network to basically just make sure the games play really nicely in 4k and speaking of 4K existing PlayStation 5 games they always had two modes which was either 1080p 60 frames per second or 4K at 30 frames per second Sony's now offering a PR mode that glues both of those together and so you're getting both 60 frames per second and 4K now that's exactly what I would have wanted to play in the first place if you're interested in doing things like 8K gaming or you want to do things like 120 frames per second there are capabilities for games to do that but those are going to be on a game by game basis the real push here is for really nice 4K 60 Fram per second across the board for your entire Library what does this mean for the future of PlayStation I got to talk Future of PlayStation to Mark cery lead systems architect for PlayStation and hiaki ninan 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 rate tracing where they're using an AMD developed rate tracing technology that isn't even in existing gpus some of that will kind of ride ahead and other things like maybe more advanced Graphics that you might be used to on PCS will finally have a chance to come over to PlayStation 5 Pro and as a lot of games now are increasingly crossplatform and Sony's games live on PCS you'll probably see much more of that cross-pollination clearly a Fidelity push for people who may have really big TVs or really big AV 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 could definitely see the difference but if you're a PlayStation 5 owner I think you could also be fine continuing to play the PlayStation 5 they're going to be about 50 games that come out at launch with upgrades specifically for the PS5 Pro now while a lot of them will involve the introduction of this new PR mode that will be able to run at a smooth 60 frames per second and 4K performance there are going to be others that do other things it could be graphic upgrades to the environment more people in the environment so that's a console Sony PS5 Pro Demo Room let's go play the games this is uh Sony's Playstation demo room where I got to try out the PlayStation 5 Pro on 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 Play 5 and then the PlayStation 5 Pro uh looking at the two different uh play modes Fidelity and performance on the five and then the pro mode on the PlayStation 5 Pro that's Horizon forbidden West and then I got to play a few games on a big 80in screen including Grant TMO 7 which has an AK mode or alternately one with raate tracing turned on which is what I've got right here I mean this is obviously the version I would want to play it is the reflections and R Trac in 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 PS5 playing on a PS5 for a bit and then I would jump back and forth between that and a PS5 Pro to see what it's like this is the um the 4K 30 frames per second version of uh Horizon forbidden West which which I'm I'm used to and looks really good um but what looks even better is playing it uh 4K 60 frames per second on PS5 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 5 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 debut is on November 7th what does this mean for the future Final Thoughts 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 5 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 PS5 Pro graphics but also where the PS5 Pro rate tracing and all 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