With the PlayStation 5 Pro finally officially released and available in the market, the question in gamers’ mouths is simple: is it worth buying?
The discourse now revolves around how much performance has been seen in the early tests, compared to what Sony promised, as well as what fans expected.
We do think the leaks from earlier this year that allegedly came from Sony’s developer portal harmed Sony and the console in the long run. The specs that dataminers found and spread around turned out to be inaccurate, but made fans expect that the PlayStation 5 Pro would perform better than it actually could.
But that wasn’t what Sony promised, and we can reasonably set that aside as ungrounded or uninformed speculation. If we do a proper accounting of what testers found vs. what was promised, how does the PlayStation 5 Pro hold up?
Digital Foundry has revealed their first test results, for the ideal game for this scenario. Elden Ring was GOTY, and many fans believe its DLC Shadow of the Erdtree should be nominated for the distinction as well. As great as FromSoftware games are, they are notorious for poor support.
And we want to be clear here that we are not implying FromSoftware are bad at launching games in a stable state. We are talking about how they can sometimes be capricious when it comes to patching their games when they have known issues. If the frustration is about wanting to make more games, maybe they should be working with other studios to do the technical updates for them.
Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter criticized him in this report for not moving to fix the unoptimized parts of this game on PlayStation 5 at all. But it is for these reasons that this game is an ideal testing ground. Can the PlayStation 5 Pro do the work of optimizing and improving games the devs won’t fix themselves?
Leadbetter went ahead and used every trick in the PlayStation 5 Pro’s book to test if it can get Elden Ring up to 60 FPS, and the answer is, well, not really. Using Game Boost and Quality Mode, the PlayStation 5 Pro fails to maintain a steady 60 FPS, falling under the 30 – 35 % range. Most of the time, it runs at 50 FPS. Even worse, sometimes it dips to 40 FPS, past the 48FPS range where the console’s VRR 60Hz support drops.
Leadbetter found that Performance Mode provides the best results. VRR stays consistent, and so does resolution scaling, but it still cannot maintain a locked or consistent 60 FPS. If you were curious, ray tracing is inconsistent in improving how Elden Ring performs, which makes it clear that you do not want to enable it at all on your PlayStation 5 Pro.
Leadbetter speculates if the game will get specific optimizations in the console in the future, but we know one platform where you can tweak and improve both hardware specifications and performance settings to your hearts galore. We reported on the Elden Ring update last June, where FromSoftware finally remembered to allow you to disable ray tracing.
But if you were disappointed by FromSoftware’s slow support, you have an alternative course of action on the PC. Mods like this one proliferate on PC, and can enable things you can’t necessarily get out of the game from upgrading your rig. In the debate between settling for a high-end console, or investing in a more general purpose computer for the long term, the computer promises an edge in letting you have it your way.
It’s entirely possible that the PlayStation 5 Pro will be better able to run games like Elden Ring later, but if you want to look at things that way, you can decide to pass on the PlayStation 5 Pro for now, and make Sony earn your dollar by getting their new clunker up to speed.
