
Sony announces the Pro, a more powerful PlayStation 4 with a $399 price tag - Zweihander
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/sony-playstation-4-pro/?ncid=rss
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esturk
I'm going against the grain here and say that not being able to play 4K Blu-
Rays isn't as big of a deal as some are making it out to be. I'm someone that
bought into the 'death of the physical media' era so the fact that games and
streams can go 4k is enough for me. I have not and do not own a single blu-ray
disc and I don't ever plan to. I consider this in the 'bells and whistles'
category. It may be good to have but is probably something that I will never
use.

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dshibarshin
Although it is more powerful and supports 4K gaming and streaming, it cannot
play 4K Blu-Rays:
[https://twitter.com/thisisFoxx/status/773617609547849728](https://twitter.com/thisisFoxx/status/773617609547849728)

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mightykan
So what's the point of getting one of these instead of the Xbone S, which
_does_ have UHD Blu-ray support?

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ethanbond
Well, the One S doesn't support 4K video games (thus why I'm waiting for
Scorpio)

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dogma1138
Project Scorpio will, the PS4 Pro won't support 4K gaming either, even a GTX
1080 won't do 4K @ 60 well with modern titles.

The PS4 Pro will be a 1080p @ 60 console but nothing more regardless of how
they are marketing it, the GPU it has is between the RX460 and the 470 in
terms of performance and while they can push for 1080p @ 60 on medium/high
settings* on most modern titles they can't run anything at 4K at playable
framerates, not even "console experience" frame rates.

*New upscaling techniques like UbiSoft's Checkerboard Rendering with decent Temporal AA/EQAA will be able to upscale some games with minimal image quality loss. UbiSoft renders Rainbow Six: Siege at 960x1080 and upscales it to 1080p.

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pandaman
You realize they have shown playable 4k games at the announcement?

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dogma1138
And the Xbox One and PS4 have been shown playing games at 1080 during their
launch events so what?

The amount of games that are doing 1080p on either console is slim, they
render often at sub 900p (especially on the Xbox One) resolutions with FPS
locks to 30.

When the Xbox Scorpio was announced which is still more powerful than the PS4
Pro most developers said they'll use the extra power to run the games at 1080p
with higher settings than aim at 4K gaming.

They will end up doing upscaling of some sort, they have gotten pretty good at
it but true 4K pffttt dream on.

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pandaman
I agree that Xbox one doesn't have many 1080p games however how does it follow
that ps4 does not? Except for few games like AC, which decided to keep parity,
pretty much all ps4 games are 1080p.

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dogma1138
Yes, DigitalFoundry (they aren't 100% correct all the time, especially when
developers introduce a new technique for example when Ubisoft revealed that
they are rendering at 960x1080 and upscaling but to their defense the upscale
was so good that even their tools did not notice it) and a few other websites
constantly do actual frame by frame analysis, many games on the PS4 run at
900p especially the competitive titles that need a lock to 60.

Beyond that letterboxing and resolution scaling is still common, while the PS4
doesn't drop to 720p like the XboxOne does it does do a lot of 900p titles or
30fps locked titles (which on many it can still fail to live upto the 30fps
lock).

Even some exclusive titles which usually run on 1080p on their respective
console to not do 1080p on the PS4 KillZone and Uncharted 4 both run at 900p.

But overall it doesn't matter the 720p + TAA & Vsync on the XboxOne a lot of
times produces better frame times than the 800-900p PS4 versions, some of the
COD games and Titanfall were pretty good examples of that where the PS4
running at 1080p or close to it had major issues with frame timing.

What I would suggest is that if you care for 4K gaming buy a PC, consoles
aren't going to get there, even the new Titan X can drop below 60fps on 4K on
some titles ;)

Overall I wonder more about the CPU upgrades than the GPU, both the XboxOne
and the PS4 have started to hit the CPU bottleneck hard fairly quickly and
games which are CPU intensive like open world games, racing games and sim
suffered.

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pandaman
There are not that many 60fps games, so saying that those are sometimes not
full 1080p is a far cry from the original claim that number of 1080p games is
slim.

PS.PS4 Titanfall? Can we seriously continue the discussion of hardware merits
when you casually mention problems with games, which don't even exist?

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dogma1138
Titanfall 2 it's in MP beta for quite some time now ;) Usually on the PS4 it's
either 1080p or 60fps take your pick, but more demanding FPS titles like
Battlefield 4, Battlefront and the rest usually do 900p on the PS4 =)

If you consider 1080p @ 30 to be "true 1080p" then you are set, but for the
many people if it's not running at 60 it might as well not run at all.

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pandaman
> Titanfall 2 it's in MP beta for quite some time now ;)

Either way you are complaining about a game, which has not been released.

>Usually on the PS4 it's either 1080p or 60fps take your pick

Yes. And there are not many 60 fps games so most games are 1080p.

> but for the many people if it's not running at 60 it might as well not run
> at all

Which is a valid point you probably should have disclosed before saying that
there are no 4k and 1080p games, because much more people don't really care
about 60 fps.

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dogma1138
>Which is a valid point you probably should have disclosed before saying that
there are no 4k and 1080p games, because much more people don't really care
about 60 fps.

Because it's true, and most people and most games to care about frame rates,
even Sony admitted that most games won't run at true 4K but will use
upscaling.

"For all you pixel-counters out there, note that the games Sony showed
yesterday don't seem to be rendered in "native" 4K. While the Pro system is
capable of outputting full-resolution 4K images and games, it's not really
powerful enough to do so while rendering the kinds of realistic 3D worlds with
the level of detail we've come to expect from big-budget games."

"While some retro-styled 2D or low-polygon 3D games might be able to produce a
full 3840 x 2160 frame buffer at least 30 times a second, most games will run
internally at a lower resolution. Sony says that the Pro will make use of an
internal rendering pipeline and techniques that help fill in those missing
pixels on the display. Insomniac CTO Al Hastings said the difference between
"native" 4K and the PS4 Pro's output should be "nearly indistinguishable.""

[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/eyes-on-dont-
expect-a-...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/09/eyes-on-dont-expect-a-
graphical-quantum-leap-from-the-ps4-pro/)

The hardware of the PS4pro is less suitable to true 4K gaming than the PS4 is
for 1080p, you are going to see major upscaling but it's ok, we're gotten
pretty good at it. For the most part I expect most games to render at
1920x2160 or 1440x1620 and be upscaled.

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pandaman
>Because it's true, and most people and most games to care about frame rates

If it's been true then 30fps games like GTA, AC, Elder Scrolls series, GT, RE,
FF etc, etc had not been selling crazy millions of units.

And yes, not all 4k games are rendering everything into a single 4k buffer,
modern games are a bit more complicated than what was around in 90s. It's
silly to complain about this IMHO, because 4k movies also don't have 8M full
pixels for every frame either.

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dogma1138
>And yes, not all 4k games are rendering everything into a single 4k buffer.

Games haven't been using a single buffer for ages, however games on the PC do
render at a native resolution or higher (if you use render target
supersampling).

Console games render at sub-display buffer resolutions all the time and use
upscaling, which is what I was saying from the first post I don't even know
what you are are arguing about. The point is that calling either PS4pro or
Xbox Scorpio a 4K gaming system is misleading at best, because as far as the
frame resolution target they are going to be considerably more off from 4K
than their current counterparts are from 1080p.

>If it's been true then 30fps games like GTA, AC, Elder Scrolls series, GT,
RE, FF etc, etc had not been selling crazy millions of units.

GTA5 had major FPS issues on both consoles it was one of the major complaints,
AC has major issues on both consoles, etc. Those games sell like crazy because
they are huge franchises it doesn't mean the experience is good. FPS games
understand that they need 60fps and they stick to that often by drastically
reducing the render target, because otherwise they are near unplayable even on
consoles that already suffer from a pretty big input delay.

But sure if you accept <30 fps gaming with major screen tearing and frame time
inconsistencies as a decent experience all the power to you, but let's call it
what it is the minimal functional experience that these consoles can provide,
it ain't a very pleasant one.

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pandaman
I haven't seen Scorpio (does it even exist?) but PS4 4k games present a 4k
buffer. So how else do you call a system that does it?

>GTA5 had major FPS issues on both consoles it was one of the major
complaints,

You do realize it's sold about 60 million units? At least 60 million people
did not care about your major complaints, right?

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dogma1138
You are confusing having no choice with having no complaints.

PS4 Pro games are not running at 4K native resolution period, end of story,
upscaling doesn't count :)

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pandaman
I guess there is nothing left than to wait till November. If you're right
people won't be buying the new PS4, since you can just hook up a regular one
to a 4k TV for upscaling.

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dogma1138
The regular one can't output a 4K signal at all since it doesn't support HDMI
2.0, and it can't really run games at 1080p not to mention upscale them to 4K.

And people would buy whatever they would be sold on so it doesn't matter, Sony
and Microsoft managed to sell their current line of console as a good 1080p
experience, since there isn't a better alternative other than a gaming PC
people buy what there is doesn't make it any more true.

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pandaman
I understand you haven't seen a PS4 but want to talk about it. It's quite
common. But there is really no excuse for talking bs about TVs. Any digital TV
upscales to its native resolution no matter the input. There is no other way
to show content without black bars. Go to Best Buy or Costco or any place they
sell TV, they will educate you and demonstrate how it works.

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dogma1138
I own a PS4 and a XboxOne.

I understand that you are utterly clueless about about how upscaling in games
actually works, what is checkerboard rendering, temporal super resolution,
multi-resolution shading/rendering, etc.

What you are talking about is simple pixel doubling / stretching the image I
am talking about actual upscaling.

The XboxOne and the PS4 do not support HDMI 2.0 and do not output a 4K signal,
a TV can stretch the 1080p signal using pixel doubling but that has nothing to
do with the console and it would create pretty terrible aliasing as well as
other artifacts.

You may now resume being a clueless condescending troll.

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m_mueller
Has anyone been able to compare PS VR with Oculus / Vive? How big of a deal is
the pixel density? Any noticeable lag?

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jbb555
How is this going to work? Are there going to be games for it that won't run
on the cheaper version? Will they design games for this and simply cut out
graphics features to make it run on the slower version? Will companies really
invest the money in making two versions that both work well?

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ferrari8608
> Will they design games for this and simply cut out graphics features to make
> it run on the slower version?

That's how the relationship between high-end PC games and the consoles work
right now, so it's probably the case.

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samfisher83
Wasn't the whole point of consoles you wouldn't have to upgrade every couple
of years?

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riboflava
No, it was just the last gen of consoles lasted so long. The bigger benefit is
on the dev side by having a single hardware target and also hardware that can
be put together much more intimately than a PC to really milk its performance.
Though that could also benefit consumers because they could get the best
performance experience for the cheapest amount and it would take PCs time to
catch up in either absolute or affordable performance. The last gen of
consoles was arguably the _last_ gen, the current gen has been much less
console-like in many ways. (You could build a PC matching the PS4's
capabilities on the PS4's launch day for less money. The xbone almost shipped
without disks.)

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aboonaboo
Most console people say pc sucks because you have to upgrade so...this is
ironic

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crims0n
Although the console supports 4K, it does not support Ultra HD (4K) Blu-ray. I
feel like this was a large missed opportunity. I was on the fence about
upgrading before I heard this, now I don't think I will.

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iammyIP
I wonder why they advertise so much for 4k resolutions, when they still run
with a 60degree fov on 30fps with resolutions under 2k. This is madness.

