The PS5 Pro launched in November 2024 at £699 without a disc drive, making it the most expensive PlayStation hardware at launch since the original PS3. Six months in, the honest assessment is: it is a better piece of hardware that serves a narrow audience very well and made no meaningful case to everyone else.
The Pro’s central promise was PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), Sony’s answer to DLSS and FSR. The technology delivers noticeable image quality improvements in supported titles, with cleaner edges and better upscaling than the base PS5 achieves with its existing implementation. In games like Gran Turismo 7, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Horizon Forbidden West, PSSR makes a visible difference in motion clarity and detail retention.
The problem is the support list. Six months after launch, the number of games with meaningful Pro enhancements is smaller than the launch narrative suggested it would be. Many major releases have been slow to add Pro patches, and the improvement when patches do arrive varies significantly.
“It runs games better. Whether that justifies £699 depends entirely on how much visual fidelity matters to you,” is roughly the conclusion most honest reviews reached at launch. That remains accurate.
The audience who benefits most from the PS5 Pro: players who sit close to a large screen, value 60fps with better image quality over raw frame rate, and have already extracted maximum value from the standard PS5. That is a real audience. It is also a niche one.
Sony’s decision to omit the disc drive was, commercially, a mistake in terms of perception. The additional cost to include it would have been absorbed more easily than the optics of selling a £699 console that cannot play physical media without a £100 accessory.
The hardware itself is not a disappointment. The price remains difficult to defend to anyone without a specific use case.
