If you’ve got yourself a PS5 Pro for Christmas, then you need to make sure you’re getting the most out of Sony‘s high-end console. After all, you’re dealing with an incredibly advanced piece of kit; you want to push it to its limits. We’ve hand-picked a set of games that’ll show off exactly what your PS5 Pro can do.
While the PS5 Pro can leverage PSSR to upscale games to run at ultra-high definition on a 4K TV, push titles to maintain high frame rates on 120HZ monitors and use advanced ray tracing to make game worlds look more realistic than ever, these fancy new features aren’t used in every game. By all means, boot up your new console to play Gang Beasts, but you won’t be seeing any of the benefits of the mid-generation upgrade. To do so, you’ll need to be playing PS5 Pro-enhanced games.
Currently, 50 games in the PS5 catalog have been given the PS5 Pro enhanced treatment. How developers implement the new technology differs from game to game. For instance, in Hogwarts Legacy, developer Avalanche uses the extra power to increase the view distance in performance mode and saves the ray tracing technology for fidelity mode. Meanwhile, in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, ray tracing has been added to performance mode, but in fidelity mode, you have both ray tracing and better view distances.
We’ve picked through the list of PS5 Pro-enhanced games and selected a set that shows off what your new console is capable of and delivers a spread of genres and experiences. It’s a veritable Santa’s sack of great-looking games.
Alan Wake 2
Remedy Entertainment’s 2023 horror game, where you play a writer trapped in an alternate dimension and an FBI agent investigating ritualistic murders, already looked good on the PS5. (It played well, too, making it an easy pick for our Game of the Year list 2023.) The developer used dense set design and rich lighting at every turn to create almost realistic environments. So, how has Remedy taken it further?
For a start, Alan Wake 2 on PS5 Pro now features ray-traced reflections on surfaces like water and glass, making the world even more realistic. Remedy uses the PSSR AI-upscale technology to create the most detailed frames possible on your 4K television. It also now looks much better in motion. The main difference, however, is that you’ll see far fewer frame rate drops than you did in the version on the original PS5.
It’s no surprise Remedy jumped at the chance to exploit the power of the PS5 Pro; the studio was born out of the ’90s demoscene, where developers wrung every last drop out of graphics cards to create almost hallucinogenic 3D videos. That lineage is on display in every frame of Alan Wake 2.
Gran Turismo 7
With the Gran Turismo series, Polyphony Digital has long pushed Sony’s consoles to the edge of what was possible with the hardware. Each entry is reliably one of the best-looking games released each generation. And, considering Gran Turismo 7 came out almost three years ago and still looks better than almost anything else you can play on a console, we were excited to see how a PS5 Pro could hope to improve its excellence.
The first place you’ll see a marked change is ray-tracing, which is now on show in races themselves. Before, the feature was only active in the post-race replay. With every car on the track buffed to the nines and covered in reflective surfaces, the lighting tech’s impact is much more visible than in other games. You will also see steady 60fps frame rates in this fidelity mode and 120fps in performance mode.
Polyphony Digital has always been a forward-looking developer, which may explain why Gran Turismo 7 on PS5 Pro supports 8K displays when so few people own such expensive screens. Now, you can be safe knowing that if you buy one in the future, your PS5 Pro will upgrade with you.
Demon’s Souls
A launch title for the PS5, Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls remake was a real statement piece. It was Sony’s way of showing us how far its consoles had come since the original game’s PS3 release in 2009. It’s often said that we won’t ever see a visual leap in consoles quite so pronounced as the jump from PS1 to PS2, but Demon’s Souls showed the stark difference in what’s become possible in the past 15 years. This also makes it an excellent demonstration of the step forward the PS5 Pro represents.
In the remake’s first release, you had to choose between a game that ran at a lower 1440p resolution but could hit 60fps or go with the higher fidelity 4K mode and only reach around 30fps. On the PS5 Pro, both modes now hit 60fps, and there’s a new shadow system to make the gothic gloom of Boletaria run even deeper.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Insomniac’s world-jumping adventure game was already one of the best-looking games on PS5. As one of the first titles revealed for Sony’s console, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart used the SSD and graphics card to hop you between sumptuous world after sumptuous world in quick succession. The team had already done a great job squeezing the last bit of juice out of the base console, offering ray-traced reflections even in Ratchet and Clank’s performance mode.
To improve on what was already there, on PS5 Pro, Insomniac has increased Ratchet and Clank’s resolution from 1440p to 1584p and then upscaled that increased detail to 4K. You’re left with a much more detailed game that runs extremely smoothly. Everywhere you look, you’ll find a more detailed and vibrant world.
Horizon Forbidden West
Like Polyphonic Digital, Guerilla Games is one of the studios in Sony’s stable that pushes the hardware with every release. From Killzone through to the Horizon series, you can trust the team will produce something that looks phenomenal on your console. Horizon Forbidden West, with its foliage-dense open world, detailed character models, and rich lighting model, was one of the best-looking games on PS5 out of the gate. On PS5 Pro, it’s a leap ahead.
Thanks to Horizon Forbidden West‘s rendering tech changes, the performance mode on PS5 Pro improves even on the quality mode on the base console. The fine details of foliage and hair both look better, and the game runs at a steady 60fps.
There are many first-party open-world games to choose from on PS5, but Horizon Forbidden West is the one that will make your new console sing.
If you’re looking for accessories for your PS5 Pro, we recommend these to all new PS5 owners this Christmas.
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Julian.benson@futurenet.com (Julian Benson)
