They certainly lost me, for the time being, with this news. I was going to pick up a PS4 Pro, but I don’t have a 4K television… and I’m not going to pick up a vanilla PS4 knowing that I don’t buy lots of consoles and likely will have a 4K TV soon. So, I’ll wait. It would have been the first console purchase for me in 7 years.
If you’re waiting, that means you aren’t interested in any exclusive titles. So there’s no particular reason to buy a console at all.
Since they named it the Pro it shouldn’t have these issues.
If they named it Slightly Better Edition they would be excusable.
Pro gamers ain’t got time for this.
Actually, I am interested in the PS4 exclusives. Plus, my main gaming PC isn’t powerful enough to run most new games at decent quality.
Seriously. This stuff should work. It’s essentially a PC. It is not rocket science.
The Pro will likely be a worthy buy for you in a few months if you want to play the exclusives at their best. By the time the consoles are discounted in January, you’ll have a better idea of whether the devs got to grips on how to compromise for rock solid 1080p. Bargain price and better game experience all in one. :)
I’m waiting for Scorpio myself (as I’m more invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, both with backwards compatible games and the One). By the time that one comes out, the Pro will have paved the way and everything should be golden. I’m quite optimistic these are simply growing pains. It’s just a pity they are occurring on some big titles and undermine the original message.
Wendelius
I’m not dismissing it. Your description of the situation was patently false. There are people perpetuating this idea that most games are running worse on the Pro than the base model when the reality is only 5 or so of the 40 games with Pro mode have any issues. None of those are in any way game breaking and there’s every possibility that further patches will clean up the sore spots.
I ordered the PS4 Pro because I didn’t buy any consoles this generation, but there are enough Sony console exclusives that I was interested.
And then I bought a new TV for it earlier than expected because reasons.
(Seriously, for the first time ever I actually own a state of the art TV)
What is patently false about Watch Dogs running worse or other games? Because there are others which is patently a FACT. Its not just about the percentage of titles. This thing in a “premium” product. You for whatever reason can’t understand the point of this should never have happened. This is the end of my going back and forth with you. You either understand this or you don’t.
This is what you originally wrote. But the problem has nothing to do with the way unpatched games run on the Pro. Those run without any measurable difference. And the problem has nothing to do with 1080p output since the games in question are all running internally at much higher resolutions when the frame drops occur. So a small number of games in a small number of situations incur a small performance hit while delivering a visual upgrade. I think it’s extremely misleading to characterize that as “all sorts of performance issues” or “a lot of problems running in 1080p”.
EDIT: I misread the article. The following sentence is wrong. In fact, the claim in the article is in fact that some designed-for-pro games run worse at 1080p than at 4k precisely because everything has to be downsampled back to 1080p for display.
Personally, I would characterize “drop frames in order to downsample” as a visual downgrade, not a visual upgrade. But obviously your opinion differs.
It’s unclear to me whether the situation here is:
• Ubi should be recognizing that the machine is attached to a 1080p display, and therefore not be using (utterly pointless) 4k textures internally, or
• This is just the way the PS4 APIs work, and there is in fact no facility for choosing among different texture sets based on the output device, and Watch Dogs just performs poorly because it has more textures to grind through.
• Something else.
I’d characterize the first issue as Ubi’s bug, the second issue as poor API design, and the third issue as “I dunno.” I don’t have access to a Sony dev kit, so I can’t say for sure.
Sorry, that’s just not true. The article does not make a PS4 Pro at 1080p vs. PS4 Pro at 4K comparison. It’s comparing PS4 Pro (doesn’t matter whether it’s at 4K or 4K->1080p) to PS4 at native 1080p.
As I understand it from the DF articles, it’s not “utterly pointless”; rendering at 4K and downsampling to 1080p does actually provide a slightly better image. It sounds like they were intentionally trying to include this as a benefit, but that in some games this slight benefit comes with a frame rate hit that fans are rightly upset about since Sony assured us that wouldn’t happen.
But it sounds like there’s a valid technical reason for what they tried to do, it wasn’t just a total random screwup.
What if these are the only 5 games I wanted for my PS4PRO, then it would be all of the games running better on legacy hardware.
@jsnell - I went back and read the article again and – you’re totally right. I simply misread it. Will edit my earlier post to note that I’m a bonehead.
This is gonna be a subjective evaluation, of course, but my impression has always been that assets that are targeted at a certain resolution are generally going to look better than assets that have been down-sampled to match. (My understanding is that downsampling can improve assets that contain unintentional noise, like photos, but my assumption - maybe I’m wrong? - is that assets generated for a game to target a specific resolution aren’t going to be in that category.)
From Digital Foundry’s initial PS4 Pro review:
What does the Pro offer [for 1080p gaming]?
The bottom line is that it’s going to vary on a per-game basis. At the most basic level, you should get super-sampling as standard - the process where a higher resolution image is downscaled to 1080p. It may not sound particularly thrilling, and the boost to image quality basically depends on how good anti-aliasing was in the base PS4 title to begin with. Titles like Uncharted 4 are already extremely clean, but the difference in others can be dramatic.
Rise of the Tomb Raider has real issues coping with sub-pixel detail, resulting in shimmering and pixel-popping that severely detracts from what is otherwise a simply beautiful game. PS4 Pro, running in super-sampling mode, cleans up nearly all of the artefacts and looks simply sensational. Furthermore, games operating with dynamic resolutions also see clear benefits - Titanfall 2 is a key case in point here.
I just received Titanfall 2, since I’m part of the problem and waited for it to be cheap. It looks stellar on the Pro, even without HDR.
I also booted up Overwatch, which now has Pro support. No other details were given in the patch notes, and it didn’t look super different to me.
Hooked up my PS4 Pro last night (my first PS4). Nice system, except it’s not recognizing that my TV (Vizio P65) can do 4k HDR. Seems to be a common problem, ugh.
Just FYI but HDR is not the same as Dolby Vision. Both are high def standards but only the HDR standard is being supported by Sony. (Technically I believe it’s called HDR-10). It’s Blu Ray vs HD-DVD again. I believe Visio went with Dolby Vision.