The PS5 Pro presentation was a disappointment overall. Sony made a lot of mistakes, and some of them were so serious I still find it hard to understand how a company of its caliber could have fallen into their hands.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. The presentation video accumulated more than 160,000 dislikes on YouTube just 24 hours after its release, more than tripled the number of likes, which totaled 52,000.
Reactions on social media were also very negative. “The people” spoke loud and clear, Sony was wrong with PS5 Proand as I told you a few days ago, it has set a dangerous precedent that could lead to a significant price increase in the next generation of consoles, which will be led by PS6 and Xbox Next.
What Sony Got Wrong With PS5 Pro
Well, in many things, in fact I think the only thing he got right was the simplicity with which he offered some performance data, but He didn’t even know how to do this quite right.because instead of giving concrete figures for the new PS5 Pro specifications, it offered percentage increases compared to the original model.
Unnecessary and absurd, and at the same time counterproductive, because if you are saying that its GPU has 67% more computing units and that it is up to 45% more than PS5 in rasterization, you are generating important doubts that you are not going to explain.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of a long list mistakes that Sony has made with PS5 Pro, and that make its presentation one of the worst rated in history. Let’s review the most important mistakes below.
1.- Games shown during the presentation
Sony did not take advantage of the video to show no new game specifically designed to take advantage of the potential of PS5 that could show a significant difference, and this was a very serious mistake, because if you want to sell the improvements and power of a new console you need games that are capable of reflecting them.
Instead of using some new game, or resorting to really demanding games that have surprised with their technical innovations, Sony showed a majority of intergenerational transition games that are available for a long time on PS4 and PS5.
- Spider-Man 2, which is a game that was released for PS4 and PS5. The former will soon be 11 years old.
- The Last of Us Part II, another game that has arrived on both PS4 and PS5, and which barely showed any noticeable improvements in the video.
- Hogwarts Legacy, which is another cross-generational transition game released for PS4 and PS5 Pro, whose improvements focused on ray tracing limited to slightly better-tuned reflections.
- Gran Turismo 7, which is more of the same, since it was released on PS4 and PS5, and its main improvement will be that ray tracing applied to reflections can now be used in races.
The rest of the games used in the video, such as Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart and Horizon Forbidden West (another PS4 and PS5 game), also failed to generate any hype. This was the main problem of the PS5 Pro presentation, and what made it so poor and uninteresting, the selection of PS4 and PS5 games that Sony used.
2.- Words without actions about the potential of PS5 Pro
Without a doubt the second big problem of the presentation. Sony said important things during the presentation of the console that They resolved important doubts, and this is positive, such as:
- That this console will be 45% more powerful in rasterization.
- Which will double ray tracing performance.
- Which will use AI-powered smart rescaling (PSSR).
- Which will be able to run games in quality mode at 60 FPS.
However, in the presentation video he was unable to accompany these words with data and concrete demos that would allow him to truly demonstrate the value of all these keys. In fact They didn’t even show a real-time comparison of PSSR in games, And this was precisely the most important and most anticipated technology of this new console.
The latest information I have been able to consult says that Sony did not go into depth about PSSR with a real-time demo because this I had image quality issues, and had to be recently patched “urgently” to fix them. It makes sense, and the information comes from a developer who is already working on that console, so it is very credible.
Regarding the overall performance improvement and ray tracing, yes, Sony was a little clearer, but it missed the mark. Telling me that PS5 Pro will be able to run games that are also available for PS4 in quality mode and at 60 FPS seems almost a joke, and the same goes for telling me that it will be able to apply ray tracing. to previous generation gamessuch as Hogwarts Legacy, Gran Turismo 7 and Spider-Man 2.
At times It seemed that Sony forgot that PS5 Pro should be compared to PS5 and not PS4and that to do so it was necessary to use games exclusive to this generation, titles with demanding graphics engines and with graphic qualities that really require a high level of performance, and not with games that can even run on an Xbox One.
3.- No details about the console’s processor
There is a saying that if something doesn’t stand out in an ensemble, it’s better not to talk about it and leave it in the background. Sony took this literally, and avoided giving details about the PS5 Pro processor, something that frankly seems like a mistake to me because it hides important information, since this will largely determine the console’s real capacity to run games at a stable 60 FPS.
It has been known for some time that this console will repeat a Zen 2 processor with 8 cores and 8 MB of L3 cache, and will run at a maximum of 3.85 GHz. It is not clear if that will be its base speed, or if to reach it it will have to use a special mode that will reduce GPU performance by 1.5% in order to increase the working frequency.
That processor is going to be only slightly faster than the PS5’s, but it will have the same IPC and the same number of cores, so the actual difference between the two is going to be minimal. In games that are more CPU-dependent, such as those that put on-screen a lot of NPCs (GTA 6 would be an example), this component could act as a major bottleneck.
Some of you might be thinking that nothing is wrong, that PSSR will do magic and reduce the workload on the GPU to achieve better performance, but you forget that When we reach a certain resolution threshold, upscaling no longer improves performance, because it encounters a bottleneck caused by the CPU.
It is very likely that PS5 Pro will end up being found more than once on more than one occasion, in fact some sources are already warning that if GTA 6 does not work at 60 FPS on PS5 it will not work at 60 FPS on PS5 Pro either, because both have practically the same CPU, and because This would be the limiting factor in this game.the big bottleneck.
4.- An unprecedented and ridiculously high price
The truth is that I was convinced that PS5 Pro was going to cost, at most, 600 euros in Spain, and that Sony was going to take advantage of its launch to lower the price of PS5, even if it was only a symbolic drop that would reduce its price by 50 euros to return it to the original launch price, but in the end it was not like that.
Sony has left us all with a twisted expression by announcing that PS5 Pro will cost 799.99 euros in Europe. This price includes taxes, but it is an exaggeration, because Even when converting the price from dollars to euros and applying VAT, we have a result of 763 euros.which means that Sony has rounded up. Perhaps it seemed like too little money and wanted to fine-tune things a bit more, after all, 36.99 euros extra per console sold is a lot of money when you sell several million units.
Is the PS5 Pro price justified? Some people may think so, but the truth is that Sony has only introduced major changes to the GPUthis is the only truly “revolutionary” component compared to PS5 that this new console brings, because as I said before it will have the same CPU, the same total amount of memory, although it is true that it will be faster, and it will have an SSD drive with twice the capacity. The price difference between a 1 TB SSD and a 2 TB one is usually between 50 and 60 euros.
Con PS5 Pro Optical drive has been removedso this represents a significant cost reduction. Taking a general balance, it is very clear to me that the price of this console is not only not justified, but it is an absurdity and a blatant attempt by Sony to take advantage of consumers because it knows that it will not have competition from Microsoft.
The PS5 Pro is priced at double the price of the PS5 without an optical drive at launch. In exchange, it offers a more powerful GPU with better upscaling, slightly faster memory, and an SSD with twice the capacity. Is it worth paying double for this? I think the answer is pretty clear, although I am also clear that there will be those who think so, and those who will defend Sony and this console tooth and nail even though they will not even be able to buy it.
5.- Without optical drive and without vertical stand
As I said, PS5 Pro is priced at 799.99 euros, but if we want to add an optical drive and a vertical stand the total price rises to almost 950 euros. With that money we can buy a PS5 and a Nintendo Switch, or a Steam Deck and a Nintendo Switch, among many other combinations that would represent a much more interesting investment.
I understand that Sony is ultimately a company and wants to maximize its profits. I can also accept that it decided to launch a new console without an optical drive to reduce the selling price, but that’s just PS5 Pro price without optical drive is still ridiculously highand I personally believe that there is no justification whatsoever.
On the other hand, launching a console at such a high price and not even including a stand to support it vertically has been seen by many users as the height of greed, and the truth is that they are not wrong. If I remember correctly PS5 came with a support stand to place the console verticallybut Sony stopped including it in PS5 Slim, and has done the same with PS5 Pro.
As I said before, in the end everything adds up to revenue. If you stop including the vertical support stand and make millions of people have to buy it separately, In the end you are generating a good peak of millions of euros in revenue derived solely from sales of that accessory.
Is it worth buying a PS5 Pro?
For the price this console has right now No, I have it very clear. If we want to have it complete, with optical drive and stand and be able to play online mode for a year We will have to pay around 1,020 eurosand with that money we can build a very interesting PC. Here is a quick example with the prices and offers I found at the time of writing this article:
- Core i5-12400 for 113.99 euros.
- B760 motherboard for 90 euros.
- 32 GB of DDR5 at 5,200 MT/s for 99.95 euros.
- GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER for 589.95 euros.
- 650 watt power supply for 50 euros.
- 2TB SSD for 111 euros.
- Chassis for 30 euros.
The total price for that configuration would be 1,085 euros rounding up. It’s true that we wouldn’t have an optical drive, but in the PC world with Steam, Good old Games and the Epic Games Store this doesn’t make any sense. In terms of power, this PC totally beats the PS5 Pro in every way, although the difference is overwhelming in ray tracing and at the level of advanced technologies, since that GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER supports the NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 ecosystem, which includes:
- DLSS Super Resolution, a hardware-accelerated intelligent upscaling.
- DLSS Frame Generation, which generates frames using hardware-accelerated AI.
- DLSS Ray Reconstruction, a noise reduction technique that improves performance and image quality by working with path tracing.
Source: www.muycomputer.com
