Sony PS5 Pro

We met last year's PlayStation 5 Pro with a comprehensive, technical analysis of what it brought to the PS5 party, as much in technical specs as in launch-window game testing. But early impressions don't tell the full story of a mid-generation hardware refresh.

That leads us to today, the one-year anniversary of its November 2024 launch, with an opportunity to review the full PS5 Pro games library. How has software generally turned out on the system? And does owning this higher-end Sony console truly make us feel more professional?

Our verdict: The PS5 Pro difference has certainly been evident, but there's no real guarantee that you'll get a genuinely game-changing experience with each new game you buy. And generally speaking, the PS5 Pro has not delivered as definitive a console-power win as its elder PS4 Pro sibling.

After a year of testing dozens of PS5 Pro-compatible games and patches, our core team of John Linneman, Oliver Mackenzie and Tom Morgan put their heads together for a lengthy chat about their findings, along with examples at all ends of the spectrum.

Good-to-great boosts: the PS5 Pro games we highly recommend

While we haven't tested every compatible game on PS5 Pro over the past year, our testing process included both popular existing PS5 software and brand-new games that launched in the past 12 months with verbose PS5 Pro support. In a majority of these games, the more powerful PlayStation console delivered either a clearly superior experience or an overall improvement. Here are some highlights from our lengthy list.

Gran Turismo 7: One of the most comprehensive PS5 Pro upgrades, delivering excellent boosts for those on 4K panels, improvements for 120Hz racing along with bespoke support for PSVR 2 and even 8K displays. GT7 delivers comprehensive ray tracing support on track, not just in replays, while the replay mode now allows for RT to run at 60 fps.

Assassin's Creed Shadows: The game itself is excellent, of course, but the standard PlayStation 5 only allows the game-changing ray traced global illumination to run at 30fps or 40fps modes. It's only PS5 Pro that opens the door to ray tracing at 60 frames per second, and it's worth it.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth: At launch, Rebirth had genuine issues on the standard PS5, with every available mode turning in an unappealing compromise. Performance rode ran in a blurry state, and quality mode made the series' improved combat feel sluggish at a mere 30 fps. While PS5 Pro's resolution figures aren’t elevated much above the base console, it produces an effective, 4K-like image with the use of PSSR, and hits a steady 60 fps to boot.

Control: Ultimate Edition: We had to wait until roughly one month ago for Remedy's Control to finally get ray tracing support on consoles, but this crucial update landed in time for our one-year retrospective on PS5 Pro. And it's a Pro-defining experience: frame rates in the high 50s, compared to dips into the low 30s on base consoles, with ray tracing enabled, along with one of the Pro's better PSSR implementations. You can even judge for yourself by choosing between Sony's upscaler and Remedy's in-house TAA, since Control on PS5 Pro is one of a handful of games to give players a choice on that front.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: One of PS5 Chief Architect Mark Cerny's biggest pitches about PS5 Pro was that it removed the burden of choice. Why be limited to either higher resolutions or higher frame rates when you can get both? KCD2 delivers such a Pro combo platter, with a base 1296p resolution upscaled mostly smoothly via PSSR that hits its 60 fps target, all while including the superior ambient occlusion, foliage detail and shadow draw distances of the base console's "quality" toggle.

Ghost of Yōtei: We keep coming back to our surprise with the game's PS5 Pro version and asking ourselves, "Why didn't Sony market this better?" Official Yōtei advertising has been quite mum about the handsome (and exclusive) ray tracing support and steady performance numbers found on PS5 Pro. Thus, we're thankful to have recently gotten the inside scoop from Sucker Punch themselves about its development.

Horizon Forbidden West: Rather than lean on PSSR, Guerrilla Games opted for its own handling of image quality and anti-aliasing for its Aloy-starring sequel on PS5 Pro. The resulting fidelity counts as some of our favorite image quality in a 3D adventure game on any console this generation. Guerrilla's custom tech gives DLSS on PC a run for its money.

Ninja Gaiden 4: An under-the-deadline squeaker that delivers the only uncapped over-60 fps frame rate for this game on consoles, paired with superior image quality. Worth noting, this port skips PSSR in favour of simply adding brute force to what you see on base PS5.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Base consoles needed an antidote for afflictions like reduced frame rates and visual quality settings, particularly compared to the game's PC version, and PS5 Pro had the cure. PSSR adds temporal stability across all modes in ways that base PS5 severely lacks, and the balanced and quality modes now offer ray-traced reflections, which are absent from the other console platforms.

Forza Horizon 5: Microsoft's cross-platform explosion this year saw one of the best games of the generation arrive on the PS5 platform. The quality mode adds nice features like ray-traced car reflections, while while the 60 fps performance mode gains increased LODs and foliage density, bringing it closer to the look of the standard console's quality mode.

Additional games that we laud for their PS5 Pro boosts include: Death Stranding 2, Space Marine 2, Battlefield 6, Resident Evil Village, Armored Core 6, Hellblade 2, Stellar Blade, The Callisto Protocol, Demon's Souls, The Last of Us Part 1 and Part 2, The Crew: Motorfest and Metaphor: Refantazio.

Middle-of-the-road: good games that should've been better

Some of these games took too long to reach a satisfactory state after launching poorly. Others may generally look and run well but have select issues we can't ignore.

Astro Bot: We expect Sony first-party titles to push the Pro hard, but that's not really the case there. You do get enhanced image quality via PSSR, though curiously the pre-upscaled image is often of a lower resolution than the base console in equivalent scenes. Screen-space reflections also look a little worse on Pro, maybe down to PSSR denoising. It's a better-looking image overall, but not exactly a game-changer.

Doom: The Dark Ages: There's little ambition in the Pro upgrades here - it's more or less the same presentation as the standard PS5, with no real changes to graphical settings or any enhanced ray tracing. Image quality improves with a new 1800p target. That's better than the base unit's 1440p, and there's a corresponding softening of VRS artefacts.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Thanks to a recent patch, Konami and Virtuos have saved this game from our PS5 Pro naughty list, but only barely. While frame-rates have become much more stable in the game's 1.21 patch, these still dip all too severely when Solid Snake runs into enemy AI, all the way into mid-30 fps range. It's a clear reminder that PS5 Pro received far less of a CPU boost than it did a GPU one.

Call of Duty Black Ops 6: Perhaps misplaced in this category as BLOPs 6 is a very good PS5 Pro game, complete with higher fidelity and greater access to high frame rates. The issue here is more that it does something we wanted to see more of on PS5 Pro: anti-lag modes that run 60 fps gameplay inside a 120 fps, VRR container, taking advantage of shrunken frame-times to push each frame milliseconds faster than base PS5. Good stuff, but sadly, this successful implementation didn't spread further on PS5 Pro. On the PSSR side of things, launch artefacts we were told would be addressed were not: the speckling problems remain.

Black Myth: Wukong: This game executes on the PS5 Pro promise to some extent, particularly with a PSSR implementation that we like compared to other Unreal Engine 5 games on Pro. Our beef at this point is the game's lack of a decent "performance" mode to capitalise on PS5 Pro's seeming strengths.

Enhancement Mode for PS4 software: Not a game as such, but we'd hoped for better from this optional "upgrade" to last-gen software. In testing, we found that it added a half-sharpened, half-smoothed filter to PS4 games that run at sub-2160p resolutions. Not only has the filter looked generally disappointing, it also apparently incurs a performance penalty, with the unlocked frame rate in Until Dawn dropping roughly 5 fps on average.

In this section, we also need to discuss the lack of additional CPU horsepower in PS5 Pro where game frame-rate improvements are not as pronounced as we'd hope for. Impacted titles include Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, which still lurches beneath a steady 60 fps refresh when Tyranids fill the screen, and Borderlands 4, whose Unreal Engine 5 implementation is still CPU-limited. (In the latter case, Borderlands 4's PS5 Pro admittedly decent upgrade isn't clearly advertised, and its UI doesn't scale up to the same 4K maximum that its 3D rendering upscales towards; a real case of "if only they'd taken PS5 Pro more seriously.")

The PSSR problem: where Sony's upscaler is detrimental

Our primary issue with PlayStation 5 Pro has come in the form of PSSR in games that clearly look worse with the upscaling system enabled. In particular, global illumination (GI), ray tracing, and other advanced lighting, particle and reflection systems somehow stymy PS5 Pro's built-in upscaling solution.

In the worst cases, developers have opted to abandon PS5 Pro versions of games altogether after a series of patches, instead of updating them to our satisfaction. And without a system-level option to disable PS5 Pro patches on select games, we're stuck with the underwhelming remnants.

Dragon's Dogma 2: Whatever ambient occlusion or ray tracing mode you enable, you'll wind up with significant PSSR flicker, thus making this game look even worse than on base PS5. Couple this with sub-VRR frame rate dips and uneven frame pacing at the 30 fps mode, along with otherwise underwhelming base resolution options, and you've got yourself quite the disappointing time on the Professional.

Silent Hill 2 Remake: This generally well-received remake had a bizarre PS5 Pro journey. At first, PS5 Pro merely boosted performance across the board, due to a lack of a bespoke patch. Then, its devs at Blooper Team updated the game to embrace PS5 Pro, but unfortunately, this mandatory patch included a PSSR implementation that outright broke Unreal Engine 5's Lumen reflection and GI models, introducing ghastly flicker. A later update at least removed PSSR upscaling from the game's performance mode, but its quality mode still has a disappointing PSSR pass that cannot be disabled... unless you play the game from a disc and decline all patches.

Silent Hill f: Deja vu all over again for a Silent Hill game, as the foliage-lined scenery in this horror sequel breaks up horrendously with forced PSSR on PS5 Pro.

Other games that escaped being on this end of the list include Alan Wake 2 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which each eventually received patches that dumped PSSR or gave users the option to skip it in favour of other upsampling or anti-aliasing options.

PS5 Pro: one year on, was it worth it?

PlayStation 5 Pro very much feels like a device designed to run the games of today with improved perceived resolution and performance, with an eye to the AI-based future of console technology. However, a proliferation of PS5 Pro-specific advancements just haven't emerged in a noticeable way this past year. PS5 Pro may come equipped with proper ML acceleration, much better RT acceleration, and more CUs, but only select games like Alan Wake 2, Gran Turismo 7 and Assassin's Creed Shadows have found ways to lean fully into the Pro's combination of RDNA-derived technologies. (ACS in particular enjoys a ray tracing performance leap of roughly 60 percent compared to base PS5. That's huge.)

The rest of the Pro catalogue feels like it's been bumped a single GPU tier in a generation, approaching a circa 30 percent rasterisation jump, thanks to more limited boosts to crucial elements like memory bandwidth and CPU clocks.

PS4 Pro, comparatively, had a clearer focus on supercharged GPU power compared to its base console, and developers could more easily and unilaterally tap into those gains. It also had more of a defined mission: it was the mission designed to bring the base unit's 1080p experiences up to 4K on the then-new ultra HD displays. PS4 Pro buyers knew they were on your way to a cosy walk over a checkerboarded avenue, while PS5 Pro buyers have had to look over their shoulder for fear that their non-optional game updates might be duds, or in the case of huge games like Elden Ring: Nightreign, might never come at all.

2026 could very well be the year of the Pro in ways that 2025 didn't quite reach, thanks to console exclusives like Marvel's Wolverine, highly anticipated sequels like Grand Theft Auto 6, and a little cross-platform surprise in the form of PlayStation's first-ever Halo (which will need all the help it can get to boost its apparently uneven UE5 performance out of the gate). Each of these may be poised to tap into PS5 Pro's upgrades in ways that build upon the best results in our first-year list.