The PS5 Pro Can Now Give Your PS4 Games a Visual Boost
The PS5 Pro is an interesting console refresh: It has no exclusive games, comes without a disc drive or stand, and costs $699. Really, other than a slightly adjusted design and quieter fans, it's all about the graphics upgrades. And, as it happens, it looks like those upgrades extend not just to PS5 games, but PS4 titles as well.
To be clear, the PS5 Pro doesn't automatically boost the quality of every game in your library. For PS5 games, developers need to update titles to be "enhanced" for the new console. On Monday, Sony shared a list of 55 such games, including God of War Ragnarök and The Last of Us Part II Remastered, which when played on a PS5 Pro, can take advantage of the new GPU to run games at a higher resolution and increased frame rates.
It's in these titles where Sony's advertised experience shines. Players can expect faster ray tracing effects (so lighting should be more realistic), AI-upscaling to increase the visuals without taxing the hardware, as well as more choice in "game modes:" On playing on a base PS5, many games offer the option to play in Performance mode, which reduces the graphics quality to boost the frame rate, or Fidelity mode, which reduces the frame rate while boosting graphics. PS5 Pro enhanced games will offer more choice here, with the option to play at 4K resolution at 60 fps.
PS4 games aren't "enhanced," but you can enhance them
On the flip side, there are PS4 games. These titles won't be getting enhanced versions, since they're PS4 games, not PS5 ones. As such, you shouldn't buy a PS5 Pro assuming that the beefier console will automatically make your PS4 library look as good as the enhanced PS5 games.
That said, the Pro does offer the choice to boost the visuals on PS4 titles, via a new option in the settings menu. If you turn on "Enhance Image Quality for PS4 Games," you can give your older PlayStation games a bit of a visual boost. (The use of "enhance" is a bit confusing here. The difference is the PS5 enhanced games are changes made by game developers to optimize their games for the PS5 Pro, while PS4 games benefit from a hardware setting on the console itself.)
Again, since this is a simple setting, and not a developer-optimized refresh, PS4 games are not going to look miles better on a PS5 Pro than they do on a PS5, or PS4 Pro. In fact, this setting won't improve the frame rates of games, which means that if a game is capped at 30 fps, running with the PS4 image enhancement setting won't change that.
However, you will notice some boost to the visuals themselves. The best example (at least, the most popular, by far) is Bloodborne: Sony has never offered a remastered version of this fan-favorite PS4 title, so since it's launch in 2015, you've been stuck playing it at 1080p 30fps, no matter what PlayStation console you ran it on. With this feature, the frame rate is still stuck at 30 fps, but the visual boosts officially make this the best way to experience Bloodborne on PlayStation.
Sony doesn't offer much in the way of details around how it processes this visual upscaling (there's possibly some AI processing going on here). However, the company does warn on the setting itself that this mode could result in unexpected behavior in games. If you encounter such behavior, Sony recommends you disable this feature.