While the half-generation update is yet to be released, there may be one game that will make you consider buying the very expensive PlayStation 5 Pro.
All Take-Two has officially said about the game from Rockstar Games is that it has narrowed the release date for Grand Theft Auto VI from 2025 to the fall of 2025, so that’s about a year away from the game’s arrival on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. There are other games coming in 2025: a new Civilization, a prequel to Mafia, Borderlands 4 (since Gearbox was bought by Take-Two), and perhaps Ken Levine’s new game Judas could arrive next year…
Grand Theft Auto V has sold more than 200 million copies, and although Minecraft has sold more, it is cheaper, came out two years earlier, is available on more platforms, and is aimed at a wider audience (including children). With Grand Theft Auto VI, we can expect Rockstar to take another big step forward with open-world games, as it did with GTA III and most recently with Red Dead Redemption 2, which was technically correct.
There is a downside to this: Rockstar tries to squeeze every bit of technology into its games that can affect performance. In the case of Red Dead Redemption 2, the Xbox One X was ahead of the PlayStation 4 Pro in both rendering resolution and frame rate stability, and since Microsoft doesn’t seem keen on releasing a console like the PlayStation 5 Pro (they think the Xbox Series X already does that out of the box), attention is shifting to Sony’s machine, as the PC port will have to wait 1-1.5 years after the console release. Grand Theft Auto VI may not reach 60 FPS on it, but if it can reach 40-45, it could be a more stable result compared to 30 FPS with the VRR (variable refresh rate) support mode.
Notes from the Digital Foundry Direct Weekly #180 – PS5 Pro Breakdown
The Last of Part 2 – 1440p internal resolution at 60fps in this PS5 Pro Mode (same as PS5 Performance Mode) with improved image quality due to PSSR
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart – Between 1440p and 1800p…
— King J 🤴🏿 (@JMaine518) September 15, 2024
Digital Foundry’s weekly podcast is only up on Patreon for now, but will make its way to YouTube later today, but you can already see how the internally developed first-party games are running on the PlayStation 5 Pro. The Last of Us Part 2 and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart have better image quality and more stable performance thanks to PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling. Gran Turismo 7 runs at a lower resolution than the base model (1188p), but is upscaled to 4K with PSSR and runs at native 4K without ray tracing.
Third-party games don’t seem to get enough performance to improve on the low base resolution. Alan Wake 2 still runs at 846p (60 FPS) or 1260p (30 FPS), but with PSSR instead of AMD FSR 2. The 30 FPS mode may have ray tracing, and the 60 FPS mode may have screen space reflections. Hogwarts Legacy uses ray traced reflections and possibly shadows. Dragon’s Dogma 2 seems to have run at 60 FPS, perhaps thanks to PSSR, as did Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which has a base resolution of only 846p but was upscaled with PSSR.
So in the PlayStation 5 Pro, which launches on November 7th for $700/€800, PSSR could be the most important thing.
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