The experts' criticism concerns not only the frame rate drops. The main complaint is the catastrophic blurring of the image.
Oh my god, how blurry this is. There's no FSR here. It looks like it's just basic TAA at 1080p. And it looks terrible. I was genuinely shocked. Looking at it on my OLED TV, I thought it was 720p. It reminded me of times when I ran very blurry games on Switch 1 – it has the same presentation. The difference in quality between PS5 and PS5 Pro is huge. The biggest I've seen so far. Pro provides significantly better performance and incomparably better image quality.
The gap in quality between the base console and PS5 Pro is described as colossal. According to experts, "Pro provides significantly better performance and infinitely better visual quality."
Rendering issues in 1080p were previously noted in the PC version as well: questions arise as to whether the game engine is delivering the stated resolution, that's how bad everything looks. Digital Foundry's recommendation is simple: on PS5, you should only play at 30 or 40 FPS. The 60 FPS mode only makes sense to enable on PS5 Pro.