I don’t need to tell you that the new PS5 Pro, which goes on sale November 7, is the most powerful PlayStation ever. The real question: Could it possibly be worth $700, the most Sony has ever asked for a gaming console?

I think I can answer that, but first I want you to find a tape measure.

Find your favorite chair in front of the TV and then measure the distance between your head and the screen. Now measure your screen diagonally. Do you have a 65-inch or 55-inch TV, the most popular sizes? Are you 3 meters away or more? No, the PS5 Pro probably isn’t worth $700. Not even if you have 20/20 vision like me. The improved visual fidelity just isn’t tangible enough at that distance.

But if you sit closer, Sony’s new gaming console can make certain games look great. Blades of grass, pillars of rough-hewn stone, the fabric of a backpack – they pop with higher fidelity. It’s enough of an improvement that I found myself want to sit or stand closer, or even connect the PS5 Pro to a 4K computer monitor to use it as a gaming PC.

With some games, playing the original PS5 can feel like looking through a dirty window. The PS5 Pro has the power to wipe that window clean.

I think it’s important to make this clear right away: the PS5 Pro doesn’t make every game ‘Pro’. To really see a difference, you’ll need specially patched ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ games – although the ever-reliable Digital Foundry has seen it can speed up some normal games too.

This isn’t a PS6. Sony hasn’t suggested it will launch or have a new console generation exclusive games. It still plays the same PS5 and PS4 titles with the same AMD Zen 2 CPU cores, gets the same software updates, uses the same excellent DualSense gamepad, and offers much of the same ports.

If you choose games that already run beautifully on PS5, such as the excellent ones Astrobotthe only differences you’ll experience might be physical ones, like the three curved scimitar-shaped fins that divide the top and bottom halves of the console, or how cool and quiet it runs, or how surprisingly light it feels. The PS5 Pro weighs three pounds less than the original 2020 model, even after you add the optional disc drive. The console is also slightly smaller.

But the PS5 Pro comes with an additional 2GB of DDR5 memory, more than double the 2TB storage capacity, and – most importantly – a 62 percent faster GPU, with 16.7 teraflops of raw graphics processing power. Add in an AI upscaling technique called PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), and it’s easily the most powerful home console ever made.

What that actually means for games is, to some extent, up to each studio. But in practice, many developers brag that you no longer have to choose between smoothness and reliability; you can have your cake and eat it too with 4K-like graphics at 60 frames per second.

During Sony’s PS5 Pro preview event, I told you that wasn’t entirely accurate: with only a 45 percent increase in display performance, there are still some graphical compromises being made. But after several days of switching back and forth between my original 2020 PS5 and the new PS5 Pro, and testing over a dozen games in all their different graphics modes, I think there’s something to that claim of “the best of both worlds”.

With every title I tried – while sitting no more than eight feet away from a 65-inch TV – the PS5 Pro was clearly the better place to play.

In The last of usI could see individual blades of grass instead of a sea of ​​green. In Horizon Zero Dawn remasteredI could make out the peach fuzz on Aloy’s cheeks. In Demon souls And Spider Man 2 And Ratchet & Clank: Rift apart And The Last of Us Part IIThe improved sharpness and fluidity of the entire image helped bring cities to life, making their castle walls, skyscrapers, floating ships and post-apocalyptic frozen wasteland feel more realistic. Everything is just more… defined.

Even PS4 games can get a little sharper on PS5 Pro: I booted up Bloodborne, Gravitational storm 2and my current kid favorite Lego dimensionsand each had minor improvements after I enabled a new PS4 picture enhancement option in the console’s settings menu.

The point is: my couch is not 2.5 meters from my TV. It’s 3 meters, too far to tell a difference between the PS5 and PS5 Pro, because those details are washed out. I can barely tell the difference from 10 feet away, sitting on the edge of my seat.

The big exception I’ve tried is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. While I can’t see it all the visual improvements when you lean back on the couch, Rebirth Definitely wins the Most Improved award on PS5 Pro, no longer having to choose between distractingly choppy or annoyingly blurry. The new PS5 Pro-exclusive “Versatility” mode offers such a clearer view than the previous muddy options that the difference is visible from a distance; I could see a few Final fantasy uber fans who will pick up the console for that reason alone, especially lapsed fans who haven’t bought a PS5 yet and only need to justify an extra $270 for the Pro.

However, with most games there isn’t much room for improvement.

And you shouldn’t expect the PS5 Pro to necessarily improve the graphics in the way you might prefer. FFVII Rebirth‘s open world still does that pop-in thing where plants and bushes appear just as you come across them, and Alan Wake II Still can’t stop Detective Casey’s sideburns and facial hair from flickering in and out.

Speaking of Alan Wake IIit’s also one of the few PS5 Pro Enhanced titles to offer an optional new ray tracing mode. They’re just ray-tracing reflections, very different from the full-fat ray-tracing the game can offer on today’s most powerful gaming PCs. Still, it’s amazing to see how realistic the windows of the Oh Deer Diner look when you can see the entire world reflecting on them, and look through them realistically at the same time – the PS5 Pro handles it well. The game runs much slower, targeting 30fps instead of 60fps, but it’s not so much of a performance hit that it becomes unplayable.

The ray tracing comes in Alan Wake II (And F1 24) is an intriguing taste of what the PS5 Pro could be capable of in the future – if the console sells well enough for developers to seriously target it with their new games. The PS4 Pro ended up with a long list of upgraded games, but it launched for just $400 with an optical drive, generous trade-in offers at GameStop, and a clearer value proposition for taking your games from 1080p to 4K. Adoption was high; Sony recently revealed that 20 percent of PS4 customers also ended up buying a PS4 Pro.

$700 will be a tough pill to swallow for some potential buyers, especially considering it doesn’t include an optical drive. Personally, most of my PS5 and PS4 library is on disk, and I had to special order the $80 optical drive (they’re a bit in short supply right now!) to get some of my games running. Sony has provided review codes for others.

You should know that reviewers didn’t have access to all 55 PS5 Pro Enhanced patches that Sony is promising for launch day. As I write these words, there are important titles that could use improvements and have promised improvements, like the one just released Dragon Age: The Veil Guard And Star Wars Jedi Survivorhave yet to release their patches. It’s possible that some of the games I didn’t test look better (or worse) than the games I was able to try. But at this point I feel like I’ve seen the spectrum from “good” to “meh.” And like the PS4 Pro, there’s real potential here if developers take advantage of it.

Ever since Sony announced the PS5 Pro and revealed both the $700 price tag and the lack of an optical drive, I’ve heard all kinds of people making fun of the company. Some suggest you need a magnifying glass to see the difference in visual quality. (You don’t.) Some suggest you’re better off building a gaming PC. (You could, but probably not for $700.)

In that regard, I turned up the heat The Last of Us Part I on my mid-range gaming PC today, a PC whose graphics card alone would still cost around $300. I sat at a loading screen for 15 minutes putting together the game’s shaders, then launched a game with messy hair and dull gray mirrors that don’t reflect. I spent another 20 minutes fiddling with the settings to make the game playable.

I then connected a PS5 Pro to the same 4K monitor. The game loaded almost immediately. It was both beautiful and immediately playable.

The kind of person who should buy a PS5 Pro is the kind of person who doesn’t want to mess around. They want the best console gaming experience money can buy, a big OLED screen to go with it, and a plan to park themselves very close to that screen.

Update, November 6: Added links to Digital Foundry for a discussion of how the PS5 Pro’s Game Boost can also speed up framerates in some regular PS5 games, and a note on Wi-Fi 7.