It's no secret that the PlayStation 5 Pro is a pretty bold proposition, financially – I can't have been the only one whose jaw physically dropped when Sony unveiled the mid-generation console's price at the end of its reveal stream a few months back. I spent the next few days telling myself it was clearly an unnecessary purchase, knowing in the back of my mind that I'd probably pre-order it anyway.
I'm a tech journalist: the reality is that I do indeed care about frame rates, lighting technology and resolutions, for better or worse, so I knew that I'd ultimately want the best if I could afford it, just like I don't need one of the best gaming headsets, but have one anyway. That's the question for most prospective PS5 Pro owners, after all – can they afford it?
I was quick enough to order a separate PS5 Disc Drive when they were briefly in stock after the announcement that the already expensive PS5 Pro wouldn't have one. So, including the console itself, that brought my total investment to a shade over £800, which is fairly staggering.
After a week's nailbiting auction, I've just sold my launch PS5 on eBay for the princely sum of £255, which means that I've actually spent £545 overall to upgrade to the PS5 Pro, for the sake of transparency. It's that cold, hard number that has left me basically amazed at PlayStation's pricing decisions, even now. For all that people talk about the PS5 Pro being £200 or $200 more than the slim PS5, in reality, if you already own one and want to be able to play discs, you're talking about a far bigger gulf.
So, has it been worth it? Well, in truth, it's too early to tell – or that's what I'm telling myself, anyway. I've had the PS5 Pro since launch day, and in that time I've only really played two games: Dragon Age: Veilguard and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. In both cases, there are theoretical performance boosts for PS5 Pro users, but I wouldn't say I've been blown away.
Veilguard is the centre of some discussion about flickering and slightly botched implementation, although I've found its performance mode really smooth at 60FPS and I'm honestly not sure what issues I'm supposed to be noticing, so it's been great. Black Ops 6 has similarly felt buttery in its multiplayer and zombies modes, although I'm not noticing much of an uplift in sharpness or detail compared to the PS5.
While I still had my base model, I made a brief comparison of some Rocket League gameplay to see how the boosting of a native PS4 title was working and, again, even with full-resolution screenshots to compare, I really couldn't see much of a difference at all. That's not to doubt that some PS4 games will look way better but to illustrate that, since it's not all games, you might not notice the feature in the first place.
Those expecting me to say that this all means I'm fuming at the PS5 Pro, and PlayStation, for its pricing and the relatively imperceptible bonuses it offers, though, might be disappointed. I knew from the outset that I was making a frivolous purchase, and its benefits are more nebulous – that's clear. I didn't buy the PS5 Pro assuming that the newest COD would suddenly run in 8K or anything; I bought it in the hopes that when huge titles like Ghost of Yotei or Monster Hunter Wilds roll into town next year I'll get to experience them at their best (on console, at least).
On that front, I still feel optimistic – whether because Yotei should see its experienced developers Sucker Punch pushing the hardware hard, or because Wilds had an open beta that made it clear we can expect performance issues on the standard PS5 and Xbox Series X as a matter of course. This was always a largely unnecessary investment to get the most from the last three years or so of the PS5's main life cycle.
So, I've still got every chance of eventually feeling like I made the right choice by upgrading. That said, right now I'm down more than £500 and searching for a game I haven't already played that'll really underline the fact that I've even got a more powerful console at all. Until then, it's hard to avoid feeling just a little bit fleeced.
