The PlayStation 5 Pro is here, aiming to usher in a new era of higher resolutions, higher frame rates, and more ray-tracing… but we’ve only taken delivery of our review unit today, so the first step is obviously to do an unboxing.
Also, my cat decided he wanted to be involved for a moment.
First impressions are naturally quite important, and the PS5 Pro is a solid iteration of the PS5’s design. It keeps the same inverted ice cream sandwich look, and which was iterated upon for the PS5 Slim by splitting the cover panels in half. The PS5 Pro now segments those panels even further with some gills, hiding some more air vents for the fan to suck in air from the surroundings.
What’s most impressive, though, is that the PS5 Pro promises a big jump up in graphical performance, but does so while actually being significantly smaller than the original PS5. It’s roughly the same height, but the core of the machine is skinnier (accepting that there’s no disc drive attached by default), and it’s not as deep, either. The original PS5 now feels implausibly big once you pull it out of your gaming set up.
One bizarre design choice is that the PS5 Pro still wobbles! Included in the box are two attachable feet to slot into the gilled section, providing two contact points to anything you set the console on, but there’s only one other contact point on the case. It’s certainly far better than the original PS5’s strange mounting disc, which made moving it for any reason a perilous chore (and also let the console wobble very easily), but you still have a tripod and pushing on a corner will wobble it. I believe this should be improved with the disc drive adding a flattened bulge to the bottom, but it’s no less barmy.
Outside of that, I’ve quickly run through the console’s set up process – using a network data transfer to copy users across, and with plans to swap an NVMe across to shift the bulk of my game data (which was unavailable within the data transfer utility).
Stay tuned for a smorgasbord of comparisons over the coming days, as I plan to look at and compare the various game performance modes across the variety of PlayStation Studios and third party games. We won’t be able to hit all of the 55 launch games, but you can expect several round ups of different categories as I work toward a console review.
I’ll also try and gauge what my cat thinks.