themightyant

@J-Dubs you misunderstand my point. FF7 Rebirth is an edge case on PS5 (not Pro) because it runs at such a low resolution in performance mode. It’s literally one of the worst PS5 games for that, looking very soft/blurry.

But while that does make it a perfect candidate for showing what PS5 Pro can potentially do - the step up IS impressive - the reality is most current games don’t start so low-res and are unlikely to look so different as we’ve seen in all the other examples they’ve shown.

After 57% said they don't want Horizon Zero Dawn

Which means 43% might. That’s a pretty high percentage for a 7 year old game.

@J-Dubs There ARE clearly observable differences in THIS game. But the reality is MOST games don't look anywhere near as low-res on PS5 as FF7 Rebirth, especially in performance mode.

We may see many more games like it, which might make PS5 Pro more worthwhile... OR perhaps it is just a badly optimised game and most other game's differences will be far more muted. Only time will tell. But while the changes are large on this one, that doesn't suddenly make it good value when it's currently an edge case.

Has ANY game in the last 10 years met Square-Enix's unrealistic expectations?

@SoulChimera SNAP!!! LOL

@Sequel Same. An extra £100 for the drive was the dealbreaker. I wouldn't have minded if it was 1TB but with a drive.

But they also needed to do a better job of showing what PS5 Pro can do

Nice! And the price is perfect.

@McTwist Totally agree on seeing more physics in games, more destructible environments over shinier graphics. We don't see much of it. Though you might want to checkout Teardown, if you haven't already, and personally I think Minecraft is still super impressive.

@OldGamer999 I suspect there will be a range of different techniques used, some will start with a higher base res, some the same, some might even start with a LOWER base res but ultimately resolve to a better overall image in the end.

That may sound impossible at first but while we don't know exactly how PSSR works if it's anything like similar solutions like DLSS it will use data from the previous few frames AND motion vector data from the game engine to create a better image, so it's not as simple as just thinking it ONLY has the lower res to work with. It's very clever tech, akin to working smarter not harder.

But I agree we will have to wait and see it all in action, but DF's early view, and leaks from devs is positive.

That's a LOT of good games. Shame.

Nice!

• as a self-confessed semi-reformed achievement whore!

Coming second to NBA2K in it's launch week, typically one of the USA's best selling games annually, is no shame. But without hard numbers it's hard to know if it was close or miles away.

@ChrisDeku and yet we see physical games consistently cheaper on Physical than Digital. E.g.

• FF XVI - £64.99 digital vs £22.99 physical
• FF 7 Rebirth - £69.99 digital vs £49.99 physical
• Spider-man 2 - £69.99 digital vs £45 physical

(The prices are from PS5 store vs brand new retail copies, not second hand which is often even cheaper.)

This is particularly evident for older games whose prices consistently drop off over time on physical whereas they often stay at RRP, other than occasional sales, on digital at least for far longer.

You say they are not competing and that a company can set both the same, but in reality we don’t see that, and as a consumer they are very much competing for my hard earned money.

Will be I interesting to see what sort of modding capabilities come to PS5. And if there will be any additional graphics modes to give a little more headroom for those mods to run smoothly. At the same frame rates we are used to.

@colonelkilgore @OldGamer999 the point Digital Foundry were trying to make is that even is that it’s the quality of the pixels not the quantity that matters more nowadays. If you can save some CPU or GPU cycles and get a similar base image then what can you do with those extra cycles to make other improvements? E.g. More on screen effects, better shadows, lighting or other things.

I agree the grass looked a little sharper in PS5 Fidelity mode in that TLOU2 example in a FROZEN frame photo. But we don’t play games like that, when everything is moving it looks virtually identical, meanwhile all the other pixels can have more detail or more effects because of the overhead saved to give a better picture overall. These are the sort of diminishing returns we have reached.

@ChrisDeku I clearly said first party.

@Titntin I'd already corrected it, my bad.

I understand the complaint about it being old data, and that is fair, I truly WISH we had up to date data that was not so heavily biased, but we just don't have it as Sony doesn't provide it. They only give us one cherry picked number.

But we can compare the data they do give over the same period.
It was 70% digital in FY 2023, 67% in FY 2022, 66% in FY 2021, 65% in FY 2020. So it's only moved 5% in that timeframe, if the same happened to their own first party games, or lets be generous and say it's DOUBLE, that would still make it 45% digital vs 55% physical today.

I want to be clear, I don't think physical is bigger than digital overall, but I do think it's a FAR larger section of the market than you are giving credit for. ESPECIALLY for full priced AAA games, like the sort Sony first party makes. At full £70 I think physical is still bigger on PlayStation, and the leaked data we do have seems to back that up.

@Thumper It's not the ONLY reason. e.g.

• They also make more money on each digital sale as there are less middlemen, distributors, retailers taking a share
• Sony can also set pricing completely without having the market dictate costs as easily.

While there could potentially be benefits to all digital, I don't trust Sony AT ALL not to take the piss. I'm sure they would be more like Nintendo in fact and almost never put anything first party on sale.

@Titntin I never said ALL models should have a disc drive, i'm not expecting everyone to stay physical, i'm just insistent there should be a disc OPTION. Choice is good.

EDIT: Sony are also very dishonest with the physical/digital ratios that they publish saying it's around 65-70% digital, but that includes a lot of games that ONLY release digitally. From leaks we know that isn't anywhere near that one sided (not that 30% is small). For example the Insomniac leak showed us between 2020 & first half of 2022 it was only 35% digital for 30+ Sony first party games and 65% physical.

That's not entirely accurate. The 360 only had a slim model, it wasn't really a mid-gen hardware upgrade. It's only really the Xbox One that had hardware upgrades. The Xbox Series X has also had similar to 360, a small redesign with the mid-gen white discless Series X which seems have to replaced the 'adorably all digital' X-cylinder that was previously leaked.

Additionally Microsoft said at the start of the gen that the purpose of the Series S was to have a two tier system from the start and not have one later.

I did believe 2026 for a while, but if the leaks about timing of partners are true and they took longer than Sony to decide then that seems like a VERY fast turnaround to get them to 2026, that doesn't seem like a sensible thing to do. I guess we will know in less than 2 years. So feel free to say I told you so. lol

@LifeGirl It's a fair thing to share. Although Geoff conveniently left out that every other console came with a disc drive but PS5 PRO doesn't. If you add that on it's as expensive, or more expensive, than even PS3.

@Fiendish-Beaver I don't currently believe the NeXtBox will come in 2026. Latest leaks seem to suggest they have also only just decided on their platform partners and 2026 would be a bit soon unless they severely rush it out, and they don't want another RROD. 'Moore's Law is Dead' discussed this a bit on the PS5 Pro leaked benchmarks video.

There's also a lot of danger with coming to market too early. Microsoft would basically have the "most powerful console" for a year or two, basically when you are mostly in a cross-gen period anyway, and then Sony can come to market with a later generation of hardware for the same price and you get obliterated in head-to-head comparisons for the rest of the gen.

At most I think they might come 6-12 months early, but I still doubt that, there's too many risks, unless they are moving to a more PC like continuous hardware model like @Medic_alert suggested.

Nice to hear of some jobs GAINED among all the 12,700+ jobs already lost this year.

Not expecting it till 2027 at the earliest but probably more likely 2028. But that slightly depends on what Microsoft does. All I can say is it better have a disc drive!

Sony Boss: 'PCs Are Difficult to Set Up', Firm Will Focus on PS5

Valve: Say hello to Steam Machine Mk2 coming soon.

@Pushsquarian I play Genshin & HSR daily. Bit their dailies and weekly events take relatively little time it’s mostly when there’s a big update every 6 weeks.

I’ve also been plying Wuthering Waves but doing the least amount possible as performance on mobile is terrible and it’s just a jankier, less polished, Genshin in almost every way. I still like it though and am waiting for the PS5 version.

All in all though it’s because I ply too many. If I ONLY played ZZZ I might keep it up but I can’t keep up with all of them AND play other games.

@rjejr In a similar boat, i've played basically every day since launch but there's enough I don't like about the game that I think i'm done. It's just so slow and repetitive at times. which is a shame because combat rocks and I still enjoy building characters and teams, even if it is glacially paced. Most importantly I have other live service games i'm playing that I prefer and I realise I am missing out on playing other games due to all these.

Though I know extracting yourself from a live-service game can be difficult, breaking habits and saying goodbye to all that invested time. Perhaps i'll try and just come back for the main story... but I know they way they are built penalises that significantly. Ho hum.

Without more information it's hard to know who's really at fault here. What we do know is that devs and gamers will suffer if this isn't fixed.

But with the limited information we are privy to it does seem to me to be pretty arrogant to try for a powerplay to gain control of Annapurna Games and when your parent company doesn't let you go to all resign. That said if they ALL want to resign there is likely probably cause.

But I don't really care who's to blame, either way we lose.

@darylb24 Sony doesn't set local taxes, they have priced it (excluding tax) $60 more in the UK than the USA, only around 8.5% more. That is not an unusual regional variation for any product, it isn't some grand conspiracy. If you have an issue with the 20% VAT take it up with local government, that isn't on Sony.

I was ALMOST tempted to buy a sealed copy of Concord online, as with all the refunds they have to be collectors items in 10 years of more. Then I remembered i'm not a collector or a hoarder!

@riceNpea @Tintin @HonestHick @Medic_alert @GamingFan4Lyf @DualWielding @Intr1n5ic @get2sammyb I've tagged a few of you who I thought might be interested in this (apologies if not).

Renowned tech leaker Moore's Law is Dead has released a video where he has been sent PS5 Pro footage from a developer with framerates compared. This is his takeaway on a tech level.

PlayStation 5

• 1080p-1600p Dynamic Res
• Mix of Medium & High Settings
• Runs at 45-60 FPS (framerates isn't locked to 60, occasionally drops to ~45fps)

PlayStation 5 Pro

• 1600p-2160p Dynamic Res (without PSSR)
• All settings set to maximum quality
• Runs locked at 60fps with no frame drops (They are currently looking into testing 4k+ & 120hz modes)

A few other notes

• The PS5 Pro adds an option for 8k (dev hasn't tested it yet)
• The PS5 Pro has access to an extra 1.2GB of memory due to "Memory System Efficiency" (EDIT: likely RDNA4)
• Documentation from Sony states that the PS5 Pro in practice exceeds 28% bandwidth increase
• PSSR just got an update from v9.0 to 9.4 (it had image quality issues) and uses 250MB of RAM
• According to this dev, there is no worry about running out of RAM (Sony added just enough usable RAM).
• "High CPU Frequency Mode" offers 10% more CPU Performance for just ~1.5% lower GPU Performance
• EDIT: Apparently adding PS5 Pro mode is very simple for devs, though they can of course go more in depth.

My take
It's an interesting bit of info, and he seems very impressed with the hardware (though not the cost) but it's also only one game, one data point. He also gets a few things slightly wrong, console hardware isn't his usual area of expertise, he's usually more PC hardware focused. But I did find it interesting.

Looks stunning but I haven't played the last 3 AC games so it will wait. I might finally play Odyssey sometime in the next year.

No. They haven’t shown they are supporting VR games, and it always comes back to games. Many third parties are also skipping PSVR2

@PsBoxSwitchOwner I agree. Though I think some of the pushback is because many people EXPECTED to buy a PS5 Pro, just as they bought a PS4 Pro, but have found themselves priced out, which never feels nice. Expectations are important, and though Sony never mentioned PS5 Pro before they needed to somehow set them better ahead of time.

But then you add the internet’s toxic ability to dogpile on anything and it’s a recipe for the OTT reaction we have seen. I also think IF they had showed it off better then we wouldn’t have had quite as bad a knee jerk response. Sony needs to learn from this.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner I agree there were differences between the two images… when they slowed it down and zoomed in. But I don’t think they did a very good job of demonstrating it. This is going to be subjective but it didn’t look like “enough” of a difference to fork out £700 to me let alone £825 with disc and stand. It looked incremental and pretty superficial to me, not a leap like PS4 Pro.

BUT I think it will start to look better when we see other comparisons, when we see what PSSR can really do and when we see the difference in newer games or any that struggle on standard PS5. There’s more to come. But first showing was poor imho.

@Dalamar yes it used to be Computer Exchange (abbreviated to CEX, read as individual letters) but they rebranded and even have adverts that say “Sex” now. It’s cringy as hell.

@K1LLEGAL LMAO. Smart strategy though, make mum think it’s worse, two steps forward one step back. Let us know when you come up for parole you mass murderer, we’ll put in a good word

@Arkz and a small store called Amazon, like the author, you might not have heard of it 😂

(Between TGC, Smyths and Curry’s one usually has a good deal)

@Mikey856 get some black gaffer tape and put 3 go faster stripes down the side of your PS5 now, when the pro comes out she will never notice

I’m not expecting this game to sell 5+ million copies, but it really doesn’t need to. It was made by a team of 65 in 3 years. If Spider-man 2 needed to sell 7 million at full price to break even (from insomniac leak) then I can’t imagine this needs to sell more than 1 or 2 million to make a profit.

@PloverNutter of course there isn’t a guarantee that games will run at 4K @ 60fps because this isn’t up to Sony, it is up to DEVELOPERS, some will always choose to use the extra power for more/shinier graphical effects not performance or resolution.

But the advantage of Machine Learning upscaling like DLSS, and presumably PSSR, is that you don’t have to run at native 4K, you can run at 1440p for example and use ML Upsampling to output at 4K. Which in the case of DLSS3 can give an image that can be even sharper than native 4K due to all the information from frame buffers. Then with the extra CPU and GPU headroom you are saving you can push the frame rate up OR use it for other graphical benefits. We’ve yet to see if PSSR is as good as DLSS but the reality is it doesn’t even need to be due to most users sitting relatively further from a tv (compared to screen size) than a monitor, hence any artefacts or imperfections will be harder to spot.

While I agree Sony have NOT done a good job of demonstrating the power of the PS5 Pro YET I struggle to believe this is a cash grab, Sony haven’t made a bad PlayStation console before and I don’t think they will start now. If it wasn’t going to offer a tangible benefit over base PS5 they wouldn’t have spent millions making it.

@LordOfTurnips A 3070 Ti is £700 here, the same price as a PS5 Pro, and that's just the GPU.

@Medic_alert If, and it's a really BIG 'IF', they can really demonstrate the value of PS5 Pro I still might get one, but that seems unlikely. They've done an awful job so far. I have the cash, I just don't think it makes good financial sense based on what we have seen. But if they can truly demonstrate:

• PSSR can noticeably increase fidelity while retaining higher FPS
• Game Boost helps fix sub-par game performance like Elden Ring
• enough developers are going to be making decent patches

... then I MIGHT think about getting one to play games at their best on console for the next few years. I can probably sell my PS5 for £250 - £300 to cut the cost a bit. But right now while I am not thinking about getting a PC instead, I do need to rebuild my rig for work and may just put the money towards a beefier CPU/GPU upgrade.

@Intr1n5ic 100%. I'm looking forward to seeing what it can do, even if for now my interest is only academic.

@LordOfTurnips I think a lot of people are mad as well because they THOUGHT PS5 Pro was going to be for them, like PS4 Pro was, but they have been priced out of it. So we are seeing an overreaction due to that too. (People calling it a scam, or Sony fraudsters for example)

@Intr1n5ic Yes. He was far more upbeat about it than anyone else!

@Medic_alert I only really watch them for three reasons.

1) I like the DF Podcast
2) As a multi-platform gamer it's nice to know if a version of a game really sucks on one platform so I can buy elsewhere.
3) I've been following Rich since the 90s - Mean Machines & CVG

But I find John a pretty miserable soul unless he's talking about Retro games. You are right about sucking out the joy. As an alternative NX Gamer (Michael Thompson) does similar stuff and is MUCH more positive and in praise of devs, but seems to be part time, and since he has started making videos for IGN there's less content on his channel.

@DualWielding That's what I was thinking. Surely can't be based off the very short clips in the YouTube compressed video online.
But when they were doing their post PS5 Pro podcast the other day they were saying they can't wait to get their hands on it. Odd.

EDIT: But i'd also add that DF are complete pedants when it comes to this sort of thing. They call games "unplayable" or performance "awful" when most of us wouldn't worry about it in the slightest. While I am interested in their analysis, especially the technical side, i'm less interested in their heavily skewed subjective takes.

Re: Sales. It's also worth bearing in mind the games budget. It was made in 3 years by a team of around 65. It's budget would have been small for a Sony game, hence it needs FAR less sales to be a success.

@Ainu20 I know I don't have time to play it yet, but I bought Astro Bot at Day 1 pricing for exactly this reason, despite knowing I can likely get it cheaper down the line.

@OldGamer999 Until we see what PSSR can do, and at what cost, it's hard to know if this is the right or wrong approach.

But personally I would have preferred 1TB and disc drive for £649.

Probably not, but it will likely run it at a more stable 30fps and will almost certainly be the best place to play it on Console. 40fps would be a lovely addition though.

I like the concept, but watching the video makes it seem like it controls like worse than a shopping trolley. Perhaps only one for the rose-tinted replayers.