PS5 Pro review: ten months on our sofa, is it worth £789.99 before GTA VI?

"Is it actually doing anything, or are we just looking harder?"

Jo asked that on the second evening, arms folded, while I flicked between two HDMI inputs like a woman possessed. On one, our old launch PS5 from 2021. On the other, the new PS5 Pro, bought from Argos on Cyber Monday 2025 for £569.99. Same game, same race in Gran Turismo 7, same bit of track in the rain.

Then a car went past a puddle and the Pro showed its wing mirror reflected in the water, properly reflected, wobbling as the drops hit. The old console showed a grey smear. Jo unfolded her arms. "Right. Fine. Do it again."

That was ten months ago. The console's own play time counter says our household has put 318 hours into it since, most of them Jo, a fair chunk of them my sister's lad Reuben, 14, who treats our flat in Chorlton as a gaming café with free toast. The question friends ask me now isn't whether it's good. It's whether it's worth £789.99, because that's what it costs since Sony's price rise in April. Let's start with what the money buys.

What the Pro adds, in plain English

From the outside it's a slimmer, flatter PS5 with three black stripes across the white panels. Inside, three changes do nearly all the work:

• A much bigger graphics chip. Sony talks about rendering up to 45% faster than a standard PS5. In practice, games that support it can keep 60 frames per second and still switch on the pretty stuff.
• Stronger ray tracing. That's the maths behind real reflections, shadows and light bouncing off surfaces. The Pro does it far quicker than the standard console.
• PSSR, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. The game draws a smaller picture and an AI upscaler sharpens it to 4K, a bit like a very clever photo enlarger running sixty times a second.

You also get 2 TB of storage, double the Slim, and Wi-Fi 7 for anyone with a router new enough to use it. You don't get a disc drive. The Pro is digital out of the box, and the drive is an extra purchase. The vertical stand is extra as well.

Prices have moved around a lot since launch, so here's the history in one place, before anything else.

Sony blamed "continued pressures in the global economic landscape" for April's rise, which took roughly £90 onto every PS5 model. That's the backdrop for everything else in this review, including how we tested it.

How we tested it

Our living room is small and ordinary: a 55-inch OLED from 2022 on a low unit, a sofa about 2.4 metres back, and a broadband router supplied by our provider that has never heard of Wi-Fi 7. For the first three weeks both consoles sat side by side, plugged into the same TV, before the old PS5 moved to my sister's house in Stockport with Reuben's blessing.

We logged every session in a shared note: game, mode, whether the Pro patch was there, and anything that looked better or worse. I put a plug-in power meter between the Pro and the wall for the full ten months and compared noise with a decibel app, the phone propped on the sofa arm. And because not everyone owns an OLED, I took it to my dad's for a weekend to try it on his 50-inch 4K LCD, then to Reuben's bedroom, where the TV is a 32-inch 1080p set that's older than he is.

Everything else followed our standard test rules. We bought it ourselves, at a normal shop price, and nobody at Sony knew we were doing this. Which brings us back to that puddle.

Where you'll actually see the difference

The Pro shines when a game has been patched for it, and the best patches do one simple thing: they end the old choice between a sharp picture and a smooth one. On a standard PS5 you often pick "Fidelity", pretty at 30 frames, or "Performance", smooth at 60 but softer. On the Pro, the good ones give you both.

• Gran Turismo 7. Ray tracing now runs during races, not just in replays. Wet tracks at night are the showpiece: headlights, reflections, spray. This is the game Jo plays most, 71 hours on the counter.
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2. The new Performance Pro mode keeps ray-traced reflections in the glass towers at 60 frames. Swinging past a skyscraper and seeing yourself in it is quietly lovely.
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Same idea, 4K and ray tracing at 60. Reuben finished it twice, once "for the reflections", which I choose to believe.
• Stellar Blade. The studio promised 4K at 50 frames or more, and on our TV it looked cleaner around hair and armour than on the old console.

The biggest surprise came in spring. Sony added a setting called Enhance PSSR Image Quality, which applies a newer version of the upscaler even to games built for the original one. Switch it on in the Pro's settings and fine detail like hair, cloth and distant fences stops fizzing so much. In two older patches we'd found a bit crawly, it was the difference between "why does the grass sparkle" and not noticing the grass at all.

That's the good news. Now for the games where the Pro does very little.

Where it makes no difference at all

An unpatched game on the Pro looks almost exactly as it does on a standard PS5. Some run a touch steadier, but you'd need two TVs side by side to see it, and we had them. Of the 23 games we played over the ten months, 9 had a Pro patch that made a clear difference, 6 had one we'd call "nice if you're looking", and 8 had nothing we could spot.

Jo now checks every game's store page for the Pro-enhanced badge before buying. If you mostly play indie games, older PS4 titles or FC with your mates, you'd be paying hundreds of pounds for a very small change.

The TV matters just as much. On my dad's 50-inch LCD the gain was still clear in Gran Turismo and Spider-Man, just smaller. On Reuben's 1080p set we tried hard to see anything and managed a slightly cleaner edge on the cars. That's it.

"On my telly it's the same PlayStation. On yours it's like someone cleaned the screen." Reuben, 14, who has now asked for a 4K TV for Christmas instead

So the picture depends on your games and your screen. The noise, heat and running costs depend on nothing but the box.

Noise, heat and the electricity bill

Our 2021 PS5 was one of the louder early units, with a faint whine in some menus. The Pro was quieter from the start. With the sound meter app on the sofa arm, the room sat at 33 dB with everything off. The old PS5 in a Gran Turismo race took it to 41 dB. The Pro, same race, 38 dB. You can hear it in a silent room at night, but not over the game.

Power use is higher than a standard PS5, as you'd expect from a bigger chip. Here's what our meter showed, averaged over several sessions:

The sums are gentler than they look. Our average was a little under three hours a day, which at around 220 W comes to about 0.65 kWh. On our tariff of 26p per kWh, that's roughly 17p a day, or just over £5 a month. The top vent got warm after long sessions, never hot, and in ten months it never once shut down or complained. Give it a few centimetres of air at the back and sides and it seems perfectly content.

It's the things Sony left out of the box that caused more grumbling in our flat.

The small print: disc drive, stand and that Wi-Fi 7

Jo owns a shelf of PS4 and PS5 discs, bought second-hand from CeX over the years. Without the add-on drive, none of them work on the Pro. We bought the drive a week later, it clicks into a slot under a side panel in about two minutes, and it has to be linked online once before it'll play a disc. If you've only ever bought games digitally, skip it and save the money.

The stand is another extra. Lying flat, the Pro sits on two small feet and is perfectly stable. We never bought one and nothing bad happened, apart from Reuben calling it "the sandwich".

Wi-Fi 7 made no difference to us, because our router doesn't support it. Downloads over Wi-Fi ran at the same speed as on the old console, around 180 Mbps on a 200 Mbps line, and a cable into the router made the big patches a little quicker. If your router is from the last year or two, check the box for Wi-Fi 7 before you count it as a reason to buy.

All of which leads to the question every parent and partner is asking this autumn: should you buy one now, or wait?

GTA VI, Black Friday and the Christmas list

Two dates matter this year. Grand Theft Auto VI is due on 19 November 2026, and Black Friday lands eight days later, on Friday 27 November, and the Cyber Monday deals follow on 30 November. Expect a lot of people to want a new PS5 in the same fortnight.

On GTA itself, a word of caution. Rockstar has said the game runs at 30 frames per second on consoles at launch. Nobody has promised a Pro mode that changes that, so don't buy a Pro on the assumption that GTA VI will be smoother on it. It may well look sharper. We'll know in November.

On price, last year's Black Friday was the Pro's best sales week in the UK since launch, and with good reason. It dropped from £699.99 to £569.99 at Argos and John Lewis, and EE went to £565 on Cyber Monday. That was with a lower list price, though. Starting from £789.99, we'd call these fair targets:

Bundles with a game or a second controller only count as value if you'd have bought them anyway. Price the console on its own first.

As a present, it's a strong one for a teenager or adult who already plays a lot of big games on a 4K TV. It's a poor one for a younger child, a casual player or anyone with an older 1080p telly, where a standard PS5 does the same job for less.

If the price is the sticking point, there are cheaper ways to get most of the fun.

Should you buy one?

We asked ourselves the honest question at the end: would we buy it again at today's price? Jo said yes, instantly, which tells you who plays it. I said "at £650, yes", which tells you who pays the energy bill.

Cheaper ways to play

• PS5 Digital Edition, £519.99 at the time of writing. Same games, same controller, smaller storage, no Pro modes. For most families, this is still the one.
• PS5 with disc drive, £569.99. Worth the extra £50 if you buy used games or have a shelf of discs, as we do.
• Nintendo Switch 2, £419.99 at John Lewis. A very different machine, but for younger players and family games on the sofa, better value than any PS5 this Christmas.
• Keep your PS5 and change the TV. If you're on an old 1080p screen, a decent 4K TV will do more for your picture than a Pro would.

Everything else we've put through its paces lives on our blog, and if you're choosing a phone for Christmas too, my Pixel 11 Pro review covers two weeks as my only phone.

Ten months later, the verdict

The PS5 Pro does exactly what Sony said it would, in the games that make use of it. On a 4K TV, with the right library, it's the smoothest and cleanest console picture we've had in the flat. Sony's upscaler got better while we owned it, which is rare, and the box itself has been quiet and trouble-free.

The price is the problem. At £569.99 it felt like a treat. At £789.99 it's a luxury for people who already know they'll use it. Wait for Black Friday, set your limit at £700, and if it doesn't come down that far, a standard PS5 and a better TV is the smarter Christmas.

One last scene, because it sums it up. In August, Reuben came round, loaded his save and played a wet race at night on the OLED. He went quiet for a full lap, which never happens. Then he said, "I'm not going back to ours." He did go back, obviously. But he rang his mum from the bus to talk about TVs.

PS5 Pro questions people ask