What are ya playin' in 2025?

[Renault]

I don't see buying a PS5 Pro as much different than just updating a video card for a PC, at roughly the same price. Sounds like a good investment to me.

Anyway, I cruised right through Sniper Elite Resistance, which, big bonus, is on PC Gamepass. It's pretty much the same as Sniper Elite 4 and Sniper Elite 5...which is a very good thing. There's a reason these games have a formula, because they're really damn fun (see: Far Cry franchise). Big open outdoor levels with a good variety of weapons to use and lots of possible routes to take. You can literally go all out stealth or commit to 100% combat, and your chances are about the same (and it usually ends up being some type of hybrid of the two styles). Not much for story here, I just skip through the briefings and cutscenes, and get right to the action. I guess I'd say completing an entire level stealthily is a pretty big challenge, because so much can go wrong, and it's basically you vs. 100+ Nazis, but it's doable. Definitely recommended. Looks very pretty too.

[Aja]

I don't see buying a PS5 Pro as much different than just updating a video card for a PC, at roughly the same price. Sounds like a good investment to me.

Your support is much appreciated. And it's true, I don't have a gaming PC (well, that isn't 10 years old or a Steam Deck), so it's not so crazy. I just hope I can actually tell the difference. YouTube doesn't really have the fidelity to show off the differences well, but I do sit fairly close to my 4K TV, so I think I should notice the improvement. The trick, though, is whether I can only tell the difference in side-by-side comparisons or if it'll be obvious. To be honest I mainly bought it for occasional framerate or resolution increases in VR games, which have a much more practical benefit.

[Sulphur]

Well, the Pro has some issues that negate its utility more than simply slotting a new video card in. PSSR is very much still early days, so in some games it actually makes them look worse than the original (usually if it's trying to upscale from a fairly low base resolution to a higher one), and unless the devs give you the option to revert, or do it themselves (for instance, in the SH2 remake), you're stuck with it. There is the hope that as they iterate on PSSR, they can update games that use older code to the latest version. Though, worth noting it may even be a dead end if AMD's ML upscaling tech ends up better, or Sony and AMD consolidate their approaches into one thing. The PS5 Pro seems to me for the enthusiast who's willing to live with the pros and cons of, effectively, beta testing Sony's tech path for the PS6.

But that's just my take on it - if you feel you're getting your money's worth in the games you had your eyes on, that's all that should matter to you, of course.

I'm currently playing Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, in parallel to Thief: Shadows of the Metal Age, and it's pretty good video game comfort food. Visually, it's stunning, provided you like the aesthetic. As a game, it's exactly what you expect from Ratchet & Clank, no more - which is a shame, because there was potential for at least some tweaks to the formula. Much of the time, you don't even play Ratchet but a female parallel universe counterpart, so why not make her play a bit differently or give her a different set of tools? Same with the dimension hopping: it's a neat effect, but in the end it's not particularly different from what we've played many, many times before. I wish they'd had at least a touch of, say, Dishonored 2's "A Crack in the Slab". As it is, this is a reasonably fun, well crafted but extremely samey game, it's perfect for a 15-30 minute session after work, but there's definitely a pretty big gap between the production values and the game itself.

That's what R&C has been since the latter days of the PS3. They're extremely polished games, with fun weapons and design, and always fun to play in bursts; but they're also iterative to a fault, and are comfortable with not shaking up things too hard and getting overly ambitious mechanically. To a large degree, I think that's what the player base wants and expects out of an R&C, too, after 20+ years of it: the same formula of warm and fuzzy explosive hugs.

[Aja]

I see I'm not the only one who listens to DF Direct! Yeah, it's a bit of a gamble. At least for me so far for me it's been all upsides. In GT7 there's in-game ray tracing now, which is subtle but cool, and the VR mode is vastly improved with the new reprojection algorithm, that makes 60 Hz actually feel like 120 without all the nauseating ghosting it used to have. It supports PSSR as well, and although DF says it's slightly worse, to my eyes in motion it was pretty indistinguishable from native 4K. And the upshot is that it allows for in-cockpit ray tracing too, which looks very cool.

Horizon Remastered and Demon's Souls both look better without qualification; just a res increase, but noticeable and welcome nonetheless. Basically resolution mode is now performance mode, as Mark Cerny promised.

And on the VR front, Arken Age and Subside both look noticeably sharper, and Vertigo 2, even though it's not Pro enhanced, runs better.

Am I trying to justify it to myself? Of course. Whatever. I suppose I could've bought a 4070 and, well, an entirely new PC to get similar performance. Then I think about having to use Windows every time I play games, and the thought perishes. I digress. If Death Stranding 2 and Indiana Jones both have decent improvements, I'll be good.

edit: forgot to mention that the other thing it does is boosts games that were sitting just below the VRR cutoff framerate to just above it, so stuff like Elden Ring is smoother as long as you have a VRR display

[Sulphur]

Yeah, DF's my goto for getting a deeper look at what's really happening graphically with all these games. Fair point about VRR, though I see it as a pretty minor pip overall, because hitting the VRR window still doesn't mean the game in question has stable performance all the way through, it's just a higher chance it won't feel as inconsistent as the base machine.*

Tell you what though, if Eva ever wanted a console to play Stellar Blade on, the Pro'll do it gangbusters.


*As a side note, From has no excuse for allowing Elden Ring to perform the way it has on either machine, that's just bad form. And even on PC it stutters due to shader compilation, leaving the best way to play the game being the PS4 version on the PS5 machines if you want a stable 60 FPS. It's kind of amazing.