The PS4 Pro Will Help Launch A New, More Complicated Era Of Console Gaming
Sony’s new, more powerful $399 console, the PS4 Pro, has been designed to improve the graphics of new and old PS4 games. But conversations with developers at the PS4 Pro’s reveal event in New York City on Wednesday made it clear that it will also make console gaming more complex, introducing greater variation in a game’s graphics from one model of PS4 to the next and among a range of TVs. The Pro will sometimes even offer improved framerate performance for those with lesser TVs.
These added options will excite some gamers and stress others. For better and worse, they will diminish the uniformity of experience that console gaming has tended to have in contrast to PC gaming.
Much of this will happen because the November-launching PS4 Pro will detect the type of TV to which it is connected and output distinct visuals as a result. That will increase the relevance, as no console ever has before, of the kind of TV a console gamer owns. It will also make it harder for owners of the PS4 platform to assume they are seeing more or less the same visuals as their fellow PS4 gamers and reviewers.
Experiences will vary like never before and will be subject to how developers tailor their games for each version of the PS4 platform (to say nothing of how multiplatform games will look on Xbox One and PC). Sony won’t let PS4 games play differently on the Pro and base model, but developers are permitted and encouraged to make them look better in any way that the Pro makes possible. As a result:
- A PlayStation 4 Pro owner who has a 4K TV that supports high-dynamic range (HDR) visuals will see new Pro-supporting PS4 games display at 4K resolution and sport a wider range of colors that allows extremes of light and dark to better display at the same time.
- A Pro owner who merely has a current-standard 1080p TV may also see marginal improvements to games that are programmed to use the more powerful console’s power for non-4K/HDR effects. According to developers working on games for the Pro, these gamers may see the game they’re playing running at a more stable framerate or with some improved graphical details.
- Gamers who have a standard PS4 but a TV that supports HDR will be able to see some degree of HDR visuals in games that are patched or developed to support it.
- People who are playing new PS4 games on a standard PS4 with a standard 1080p TV will see graphics that are likely worst among these options, though it’s not clear how far a drop-off they’ll have in graphical quality. This option might not be too bad, because, as any PS4 owner can attest, PS4 games have looked pretty damn good as is.
Confusing enough? There’s even a sub-variation: people who get a Pro but play older PS4 games on it that aren’t patched to tap the system’s added power. According to Sony, those games, when displayed through a Pro on a 4K TV “will have a more natural image quality and will look less grainy.”
Like the Nintendo 3DS’ glasses-free 3D and any virtual reality technology before it, 4K and HDR video game graphics are tough to appreciate without seeing them in person. They can’t be seen in a livestream or on regular TVs, which leads to those who have seen them providing eye-witness testimony for everyone else to judge. Unfortunately, words tend to fail when discussing differentials in graphical quality. The games at Sony’s NYC PS4 Pro event looked great on PS4 Pro event, which, well, it helps if you see it for yourself.
Some of the potential graphical differences were evident when Michiel van der Leeuw, the tech director at Guerrilla Games and studio boss Herman Hulst, flicked a demo of next year’s attractive Horizon Zero Dawn from one type of visual output to another. Running a demo of the game on a $6,000 Sony 4K TV, they first toggled from 4K output to 1080p. Horizon is set in the wilderness, and as they went from 4K down to the resolution on most of our TVs, a patch of foliage in the background switched from clear and distinct to a fuzzy mush. “The difference [is] you being able to distinguish the individual leaves in the distance, where it becomes kind of a blurred texture otherwise,” Hulst said. That difference, once pointed out, was stark, though possibly not noticeable in a game that has looked ridiculously good when shown at gaming conventions on 1080p displays. “It still looks amazing, I think, on a regular 1080p,” Hulst added.
If the difference in, say, the detail of foliage in a game that already looks great on 1080p seems marginal, it is. At the NYC event, developers of the game For Honor were talking about how the Pro would enhance things like the distinctiveness of pine needles in a tree and the quality of reflection on an axe. For some gamers, these are unimportant added sparkles. To others, they are the kind of visual improvements that previously made a 1080p graphics preferable to 720p or that made seeing a GameBoy game in color preferable to playing it in black and white.
Later in the Horizon demo, Van Der Leeuw paused as the in-game sun beamed through a thick cover of clouds. He switched the game’s HDR settings on and off. Here, the difference was far more pronounced. With HDR on, the sun’s rays splashed the clouds with a wide range of warm colors. Without HDR, the sky was still bright, but closer to a uniform gray.
