PS4 Pro In-Depth Analysis: 4K Gaming For $400?

TLDW:

• Looks great for the price
• want higher fps? get PC
• some examples of what games will look on 1080p screen with supersampling
• short explanation of checkbox-rendering
• same 8GB shared system memory might prove problematic with high resolution textures on high resolutions

Good enough for me, PS4PRO this Christmas, Scorpio the next.

Do any of you think we will eventually see a PS4 Pro exclusive game? Meaning it can't be played on original PS4's.

no, Sony wouldn't be that stupid + less profit for devs

I will always prefer ultra settings at 1080p to medium settings at whatever the hell resolution the PS4 Pro is playing at.

(And lol, upscaling)

Getting this baby and PSVR this year. Upgrading my PC to GTX1080Ti or Vega equivalent next year....awwwww yeaaaah!

same plans, -psvr tho +mobo/cpu/rams possibly

I guess I'm the opposite, instead of the Pro, I'm building a racing cockpit to go with the PSVR. Hopefully there are some good black Friday/cyber Monday deals on graphics cards.

4K* Gaming

I guess 1080p* gaming for the X1?

Yes, however the performance gap to 1080p for the Xbox One is considerably smaller than the performance gap for the PlayStation 4 Pro and achieving 4K.

Not doing any of those things this year. Will get a PS4 Pro maybe in the Summer of 2017 and then the Scorpio in the fall. I'll review PSVR at that time and see if it's even worth owning. Will upgrade my PS4 Pro to 12TB right after getting it. I hope it allows that size HDD. The XB1 goes up to 16TB.

4K this year.

I'm allergic to jaggies/shimmering so i do love the fact that supersampling will be included for 1080p but supersampling alone is NOT worth an additional $500CAD. I want to see an option for 60fps/higher graphical settings in 1080p. That's what i want from an "upgrade" three years after the original PS4 launch.

Is appears that HDR isn't doing much on the original PS4. The patch was released to update the PS4 and PS4 Slim to use HDR for games and streaming video. Well, there aren't any current games updated to use HDR on the original PS4 yet. Even the streaming from Netflix and Amazon isn't using HDR. What a mess.

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2016/09/ps4-hdr-no-games-media-useless/

"In order to play back HDR media on the older PS4, content providers like Netflix and Amazon would have to separate 4K resolution from HDR—and neither currently has plans to do so.

While it made for a nice bit of PR during the Sony press conference, the reality is that the HDR update for the existing PS4 is largely useless."

Ouch!!

Well if you have HDR capable tv, 99.99% chance it has a netflix app that will play 4k/hdr anyway, don't see why this streaming thing would be such a big thing, I never use ps4 for that.

I ran through some tests of my own to see what the NEO is capable of. Went with TW3 for DX11 and Hitman for DX12. DOOM on Vulkan is impressive, but a pain in the ass to benchmark as it doesn't comply with your standard stuff like FRAPS and Afterburner.

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Test Rig: AMD FX-8350, PowerColor Devil RX 480 8GB, 16GB DDR3-2400, 256GB SSD, Win10.

Neo Specs- 7-cores @ 2.1GHz/911MHz GPU core

Scorpio Specs- 8-cores @ 4GHz/1300MHz GPU core

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-Hitman DX12-

Medium(PS4/XO) Settings:

NEO----> 1080p: 53.81fps | 1440p: 48.61fps | 1800p: 35.96fps | 2160p: 26.86fps

Scorpio-> 1080p: 72.62fps | 1440p: 66.18fps | 1800p: 47.25fps | 2160p: 35.22fps

Percentage----> +34.96 | +36.14 | +31.40 | +31.12

Total: 33.41% advantage Scorpio

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High Settings:

NEO----> 1080p: 46.41fps | 1440p: 39.81fps | 1800p: 30.32fps | 2160p: 23.29fps

Scorpio-> 1080p: 65.10fps | 1440p: 52.91fps | 1800p: 39.43fps | 2160p: 30.44fps

Percentage----> +40.27 | +32.91 | +30.05 | +30.70

Total: 33.48% advantage Scorpio

-The Witcher 3(DX11)-

Console(PS4/XO) Settings:

NEO----> 1080p: 64.08fps | 2160p: 21.30fps

Scorpio-> 1080p: 86.32fps | 2160p: 28.63fps

Percentage----> +34.71 | +34.41

Total: 34.56% advantage Scorpio

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Ultra Settings:

NEO----> 1080p: 38.47fps | 2160p: 17.13fps

Scorpio-> 1080p: 50.02fps | 2160p: 21.52fps

Percentage----> +30.02 | +25.63

Total: 27.82% advantage Scorpio

@gamecubepad: that's a pretty linear scaling when you consider Scorpio has 34% higher tflops, this however does not totally mirror the situation as memory bandwidth does kick in on 4k esp, however very interesting results!

@howmakewood:

No big surprises, really. I agree higher mem bandwidth should give another little bump to the Scorpio.

For TW3 the NEO can run it on PS4-settings at 1080p/60fps. Best visual bang-for-buck happens at 1440p on 'High' settings with 'Ultra' textures with ~35fps avg, 30fps min, 40fps max.

Hitman is more straight forward due the superior parallelism offered by DX12. NEO can run PS4/XO settings and get similar frames(35-40fps) at 1800p. Step up to flat 'High' and it's back down to 1440p.

NEO to Scorpio is like a 380x vs RX 480.

the cpu in Pro might cut in the way of 1080p/60fps in witcher 3 tho, unless they cut down draw distance, object shadows

@howmakewood:

Should be accurate since I ran it with 7 cores at 2.1GHz. This is 1080p/60fps at ps4 settings as determined by Digital Foundry. Meaning mostly medium with dab of low and ultra.

Jaguar (15-20% IPC improvement over bobcat) is still weaker than desktop FX line cpu's(piledriver/bulldozer) clock by clock

*want higher fps? get PC*

Best idea I heard all day coming from this thread.

Hey it was from the video!

its not 4k gaming though. Its somewhere around 1440p or a bit more and upscaled and blurred to 4k. look at the screenshots it looks bad. The textures are blurry and fuzzy and on top of it all, the framerates are below 30 fps.

They should have just made the Pro a good 1080p 60+ fps machine and forgot 4k until it could actually run games at the bare minimum refresh rates of 60 fps or more

The scorpio will be true 4k, but the same problem exists, it will be sub 30 fps. Its fine to watch a movie at 24-30 fps, but when playing a game at that, its brutal on the eyes and not fun, i haven't a clue why they choose slightly crisper image quality to fun and gameplay quality.

No way it's gonna be doing 4k gaming with those specs. Upscaled to 4k, sure ... but not true 4k. Really not a big deal though. Almost nothing is real 4k. Even the vast majority of UHD blu rays are not true 4k. MANY of them are 2k upscaled to 4k because Hollywood is doing most of their digital masters in 2k.

With resolutions getting into territory now that plenty of people don't care about I think they should start offering output options. I mean make it so that you can choose between having the game run at a higher res and 30 fps or a lower res and 60 fps. To me anything above 2k is unnecessary for gaming. Beyond that point resources are being tossed to the wind. I'd rather play at 1080p or 1440p or whatever at 60 fps than I would 4k at 30 fps.

I used it for Netflix and Amazon streaming movies and TV shows. Been doing it on the PS3, PS4, XBox 360 and XB1 for a long time. I never use the apps off my smart TV. They are usually terrible. The point is the update for HDR on the OG PS4 is pretty much useless right now. No games currently support it in 1080P and none of the popular streaming apps is supporting it on the PS4 either. You'll need to buy the PS4 Pro for $399 to get the full support. No different then XB1 gamers having to buy a XB1 Slim.

Awwww yeahhhh...

First Professional Video game console in the history of video games, and soon to be the world's most powerful video game console known to mankind.

A build with a 480 would probably do better

faux K

ROFL! 4K my ass. If cows put the breaks on calling the launch Xbox One a 1080p console (every game upscaled) then you can't move the goal posts. I'm not surprised though.

If that is the case then the Xbox One S is a great 4K platform and cheaper too.

Very good analysis. But still no thanks.

4K gaming? No, but a great console for the price, really good deal and a no-brainer for anyone who hasn't bought a PS4 yet and is tempted to make the leap.

The real question is what does it represent in value to an existing PS4 owner? Not a lot if you don't have a 4K HDR TV and even if you do you're replacing a perfectly good console with one that nobody really knows the actual capabilites of at the price of a PS4 launch console.

My advice is just wait for hands-on reviews. I have a good 4K TV and am still not convinced, it was originally day one for me till it was revealed there would be no 4K bluray player and I just can not believe they use more or less the same CPU that was in the original PS4. Just... wait. Or sell your PS4, pre-order the Pro then come on here and cry all day every day about how disappointed you are. I will laugh.

Vega 11 to replace Polaris 10 in 2017.

Hilter's reaction to the PS4 Pro.

Why not go 1080ti + Scorpio for maximum console/pc performance?

Why even bother with a Scorpio?

LOL, you can't be serious. Why would I get a Scorpio when I already have a beast PC? All of Scorpio's games will be on PC.

Best combo by far is PS4Pro and beast PC. That way I play all of Sony's quality exclusives and Microsoft/PC multiplats at best settings.

I just refunded Forza Horizon 3 because the PC version is littered with problems, what else has been as well? Quantum Break? Gears of War: Ultimate Edition? Rise of the Tomb Raider? ReCore? Literally all games released through the Windows Store...

It seems the PC route for Xbox One games isn't exactly the most ideal of choices, as I said in the Forza thread, I'm already burned on this Microsoft PC shit, if they release games I'm just getting it on the Xbox.

You might have a point. Windows 10 Store on PC has not been great at all for Xbox games.

An Xbox for me personally is kinda redundant since I'm not too into MS exclusives but I can see why one would prefer to get their games on Xbox considering how bad their PC ports tend to be.

That's one of the reasons I want Scorpio, events like this taking place, say one of their PC games shits the bed but the console versions are perfect just like the Xbox One version is of FH3? It's all about options and diversity, they've shown to have trouble with PC games so far, and if I want to play games I'm not going to hamstring myself to the possibility of them not working correctly.

If you just have a PC, you're stuck with whatever you get until/if they decide to fix it, that doesn't sound like a very good or smart plan.

Not sure why people are hyped about 4k gaming the real advance is HDR. I am waiting for HDR monitors on pc after seeing it on my hdtv. Unless your sitting close or have 20/15 vision 4k is a waste of money. However HDR is a real game changer.

1440p at 60fps with high settings is great it can be upconverted to 4k and look great. The native 4k setting will run med-low with 30fps IMO that is a waste of power. I have used the xb1s to upconvert games to 4k and the results are good. Of course this is system wars so logic has no place here.

http://wwwguru3d.com/news-story/amd-vega-10-vega-20-and-vega-11-gpus-mentioned-by-cto,2.html

The start of the "Vega" will happen with will be called the Vega 10 (codename) GPU, a series to compete with Nvidias more high-end gear. It's mentioned that this GPU has 64 Compute Units, multiply that with 64 shader processors per cluster and you'll get to 4096 shader processors. It will offer up to 24 TFLOP/s 16-bit (half-precision) floating point performance.

Vega 11 with 6 TFLOPS 32bit FP would have 12 TFLOPS 16bit FP which correlates to Xbox Next's 10 TFLOPS rumors http://www.tweaktown.com/news/51972/new-xbox-5-times-more-powerful-ps4-neo-rocks-10-tflops/index.html

For RGBA16F workloads, Vega 11's FLOPS power is 2X over existing AMD GCNs.

Just how far do they go with that line though? At what point do they decide "the games for this new PS4 hardware revision aren't going to support the original box"?

I don't think this mid gen hardware revision is a one off thing and there will likely be a PS4 v3.0 and if they all continue to support the original PS4 the games will need to go full on PC with scalable options.

1.84 teraflops vs 4.2, seems like a no brainer, get the pro, and upgrade to the pro if you have a 4k tv. My only question is, will pretty much all new games look better on the pro or just some? how much will they take advantage of it?