PS5 Pro price, performance, and what it means for next generation

thesixthaxis.com:

So, the PlayStation 5 Pro has been revealed, and brought with it a lot of cutlery-based exclamations from gamers over the price tag. £700 for a beefed up PS5… and that’s without a disc drive? Needless to say, the overwhelming reaction has been pretty negative. But will it really matter to Sony’s bottom line? And what does it say about the next generation of consoles?

The main hurdle that the PS5 Pro has, compared to the PS4 Pro, is that it’s not selling a new technology. In 2016 Sony could tie in with the rise of 4K TVs and, making use of the early upscaling technique of checkerboarding, could make a compelling case that the PS4 Pro would give you 4K or close to it. The end results were a good bit below that, often topping out at 1440p, but this was also the advent of graphics modes to let you choose to run games at standard resolution and with higher frame rates – Rise of the Tomb Raider being an early example of this – and shore up performance in games that struggled on base PS4.

And it’s performance mode that has come to dominate gaming habits in the last few years, as Mark Cerny pointes out early in his presentation. Gamers just want 60FPS, coming up against developers who want and need to push graphical fidelity as far as possible, and also to hit a particular release date that’s been handed down to them. There’s plenty of games that launch with only 30FPS modes, before a 60FPS mode and other optimised options are patched in down the line.

That’s not even mentioning the slightly blurry elephant in the room: upscaling. The use of DLSS, FSR and XeSS has skyrocketed in the last few years, various techniques that try to fill in the blanks using previous frames as reference points, to varying degrees of quality. They allow games to run at lower actual resolutions while outputting 4K, being used as a necessary crutch alongside dynamic resolutions to keep frame rates steady, even at 30FPS. Without dedicated hardware support in PS5 or Xbox Series, both have had to rely on