Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro reveal was a confident step forward
It’s been a good year so far for Sony Interactive Entertainment. Yesterday’s PlayStation Meeting continued the momentum from E3 and showed us the next step in its plan for home console domination: the PlayStation 4 Pro. The company’s strategy was simple: show, rather than tell. The big news, if you own a fancy UHD display, is that Pro will play nicely with all those extra pixels and show off your screen’s HDR capabilities.
Unlike with the Xbox One S, Sony also spelled out the benefits of buying a Pro, even if you don’t own a 4K TV. The new, beefier machine will make existing games look and perform better on the 1080p TV that’s sitting in your living room right now, and it can also give PlayStation VR games a facelift, too. All for $399 this November 10th. Sony’s always had the edge on Microsoft with this generation, but a strong finish to 2016 feels like the gap could be widening.
Over at Microsoft HQ, the company is banking on you either buying an Xbox One S right now or waiting for its high-powered console, code-named Project Scorpio, next fall based on little more than blind faith. Faith that its scant offering of (sight unseen) HDR games will drive you to buy a One S. Faith that Microsoft still knows enough about high-spec hardware, faith that it can get developers to support the Project Scorpio and faith that your investment in its experiment won’t go to waste. That was the pitch during its E3 keynote earlier this summer, at least — all without a price, release date or Scorpio hardware to actually show off.
Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man looks particularly awesome on the PS4 Pro hardware.
In terms of HDR gaming on Xbox, Forza Horizon 3 will launch September 27th and there hasn’t been a single demonstration of what impact the increased color gamut will have. Gears of War 4 comes out in October and barring a handful of theater presentations on the industry-only E3 show floor, it’s been kept away from the public gaze. You can’t even download HDR-enabled trailers for either from the Xbox Marketplace to get an idea of what the console’s biggest game-related feature will look like. Microsoft will have the bragging rights of being first with HDR, sure, but at some point you need to reveal your longer-term hand.
And that’s precisely what the competition did. Sony delighted in showing off exactly what benefits HDR has for its gaming system. Even watching the event stream at home, the benefits were pretty obvious: games that are typically very dark (like Infamous: First Light) showed extremely bright pops of color and much more detail. In person, it’ll look dramatically better.
Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us look stellar in HDR. Higher-res is cool too, but man… those sunsets in HDR… 😎 #PS4Pro
— Neil Druckmann (@Neil_Druckmann) September 7, 2016
Demos for Days Gone, Infamous: First Light and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided all graced the stage of the PlayStation Theater. There were also announcements that this year’s Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered will support HDR as well, and Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and The Last of Us: Remastered will be upgraded to HDR via a patch. An internal source at Epic Games told Engadget that Paragon will also receive a patch that adds the feature, too. All this to say, there’s going to be something running in HDR for pretty much any gaming taste. And Sony’s not been shy about showing it off.
Microsoft’s other promise is that Project Scorpio’s raw horsepower is going to be enough to win you over next year, with no evidence of what it can do or how much it will cost. “We know it’s important to deliver an experience that demonstrates the power gap between [the PS4 Pro and Scorpio] at a price that makes sense to console gamers,” Microsoft’s Albert Pennello told Polygon. “The performance delta will be obvious.” Of course, that’s pretty easy to boast about when so little is known about Scorpio and specs are likely to change from one day to the next.
Again, Sony’s tactic was to let the games speak for themselves, rather than show off a motherboard and blather on about specs and buzzwords. Next year’s Horizon: Zero Dawn looked incredible, as did Rise of the Tomb Raider, Uncharted 4, Spider-Man, Watch Dogs 2 and pretty much everything else from the sizzle reels and live demos shown onstage. Sony was keen to explain the benefits of the Pro for folks without 4K TVs as well: more detailed imagery and overall better performance for the games you already own (or will own). People’s memories aren’t reliable, and things like the Scorpio’s 6.2 teraflops of power mean close to nothing next to the sight of a tough ginger lady riding a pin-sharp robotic brachiosaur.
Sony also extended its lead on virtual reality. On certain PS VR titles, the Pro’s hardware can double the pixel count resulting in better looks all around. Sony used clear examples to illustrate the Pro’s value proposition rather than pie in the sky platitudes. That hardware is basically ready, and the PS4 Pro will put headsets on, well, heads by the holidays. This clarity is the same basic strategy that’s put 40 million-plus PlayStation 4s in homes since 2013. Exactly what Microsoft’s VR plans are for Project Scorpio, however are still largely a mystery.
If Microsoft has one joker to play it’s the fact that Sony’s consoles don’t have a UHD Blu-ray player stuffed inside them.
There is, however, a common problem that affects both Microsoft and Sony: Each company is making a bet that, for the first time ever, we don’t need exclusive software to persuade us to buy a console. Sony has been adamant that the Pro is not replacing the standard PS4 (that’s the PS4 Slim’s job). Instead, the Pro exists for folks who want a little extra power from a machine or have a new display to connect it to. Microsoft’s company line isn’t much different. Aside from VR titles (which we still know nothing about), all Xbox One games will supposedly play on any version of the hardware, be it Scorpio, the One S or the Xbox platform on PC, yet despite similar approaches, Microsoft can’t seem to keep up with Sony’s onward march.
If Microsoft has one joker to play it’s the fact that Sony’s consoles don’t have a UHD Blu-ray player stuffed inside them. The Xbox One S does, and Project Scorpio seems certain to. The $399 1TB One S includes the next-gen physical media format because internally, the console is barely different from its predecessor in terms of power. Sony doesn’t have that advantage with the Pro. The UHD Blu-ray drive was likely a sacrifice Sony made to hit $399 while still dramatically bumping specs everywhere else.
That makes the question of which console to buy this fall a little tougher: Do you want to play games, and watch higher-resolution Blu-rays? Sony’s console offers gamers a distinct choice. Whether you’re going to upgrade your TV or not, the Pro has clear advantages over the PS4 of today. That’s something I couldn’t say when I reviewed the Xbox One S. Your move, Microsoft.
4K consoles will finally make 1080p gaming a reality
Microsoft and Sony have finally announced their new, more powerful console revisions. The PS4 Pro and Project Scorpio promise a significant performance bump over their current-gen counterparts, supposedly ushering in the era of 4K console gaming. Although we will see some 4K games, it’s likely that neither console has the power to pull off the higher resolution without compromise.
We’ve heard this story before. When the Xbox 360 was unveiled at E3 in 2005, it was supposed to play games at a crisp 720p or 1080i. The following year, when Sony announced the PlayStation 3, it did so by showing off Gran Turismo HD running at a native 1080i/60, with the promise of 1080p games to come.
For the most part, that didn’t happen. Instead, many Xbox 360 games upscaled just to hit 720p. The significantly more powerful PS3 also stuck mostly to 720p, with a smattering of 1,280 x 1,080 games (which were then processed to stretch out the horizontal resolution). To my memory, the only 1080p game I had on PlayStation 3 was Fifa Street 3 (I make bad life choices). Oh, and Gran Turismo 5: Prologue let me see my garage (and only my garage) in 1080p.
Then came the current console generation and the pitch of true 1080p gaming. Very quickly, that promise unraveled. Xbox One launch titles like Ryse (900p) and Dead Rising 3 (720p) fell short, with only Forza Motorsport 5 hitting 1080p at the expense of anti-aliasing and texture quality. PlayStation 4 titles fared a little better: Infamous Second Son, Killzone Shadow Fall and Knack hit 1080p. But all three games suffered from serious frame-rate issues: Killzone developer Guerrilla Games was forced to add a 30fps lock to the single player through an update and faced a (failed) lawsuit when it was discovered the “1080p 60fps” multiplayer actually ran at 960 x 1,080 and pixels doubled using “temporal reprojection.”
The biggest cross-platform title of the launch window, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, hit 792p on Xbox One and 900p on PlayStation 4. Both versions relied on adaptive v-sync (a trick that minimizes stuttering when frames aren’t rendered in time) just to stick to 30fps.
Things have improved a little since then, as developers now understand the consoles’ respective limitations. We now see some 1080p games that mostly stick to 30fps, with exclusive titles Rise of the Tomb Raider on Xbox One and Bloodborne on PlayStation 4 being prime examples. Even so, the vast majority of titles struggle, with shooters relying on dynamic scaling to hit 60fps and other games sticking with 30fps caps just to get by. There are outliers, of course: Lots of last-gen remasters are hitting the holy grail of 1080p and 60fps (1080p60). And some games — like Forza Motorsport 6 on the Xbox One and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain on the PS4 — run almost entirely at 1080p60.
PlayStation 4 Pro
With this historical knowledge in mind, it’s unlikely that either of the new consoles will hit 4K frequently. From what we know of Scorpio, the PlayStation 4 Pro is by far the least powerful of the two. It features a refreshed AMD Jaguar CPU with a higher clock speed and a new Polaris GPU with 4.2 teraflops of potential power. That’s a big improvement over the original PS4’s 1.84 teraflops GPU, but it’s not enough to hit 4K without some serious compromises, or, as will be more common, upscaling tricks. Sound familiar?
First-party titles shown off at yesterday’s PlayStation Meeting included Horizon: Zero Dawn, Days Gone and Infamous First Light. None of them are close to hitting 4K. Instead they all rely on advanced checkerboard upscaling, which by all accounts looks fantastic when compared to 1080p.
The only confirmed native 4K (rendering at 3,840 x 2,160 with no tricks) game we’ve heard of is Elder Scrolls Online, which apparently manages to maintain a lock of 30fps. For perspective, ESO is not graphically intensive and will run just fine at 1080p on a three-year-old gaming laptop. Naughty Dog, for its part, says it’ll have The Last of Us (a game that debuted on the PlayStation 3) optimized to run at 1080p60 with “improved performance” or 4K at 30fps.
We’ve seen no evidence that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will be able to pull off 4K 60fps, despite some vague onstage claims to that effect. Activision has a history of dynamically scaling resolution to keep CoD frame rates steady, and it’s likely we’ll see that tactic in play again. And that 4K slice of Mass Effect: Andromeda? It was deliberately chosen because of its sparse environment and extremely dark setting. Even with these tricks, performance expert Digital Foundry suggests jaggies are evident on close inspection, and it’s highly likely Bioware will upscale the final game, dynamically or otherwise, from a lower resolution than 4K for the PS4 Pro.
Project Scorpio
True 4K on the PlayStation 4 Pro, then, is not impossible but extremely improbable beyond a few highly optimized titles and remasters. But what about Project Scorpio? Microsoft will throw an all-new, 8-core CPU in its console to end all consoles, along with a GPU capable of 6 teraflops and 320GB/s memory bandwidth. Microsoft claims this will enable “true 4K” gaming. Again, though, its utilization seems improbable. You only need to look at the state of 4K gaming on PCs to see why.
The Nvidia GTX 1070 — a $380 6.5 teraflop card with 256GB/s memory bandwidth — paired with a top-of-the-range Intel i7 processor can just about pull off 4K gaming. By “pull off,” I mean that while averages above 30fps are common, you’ll regularly see sub-30fps drops from demanding games. Despite its increased specs over the Xbox One, Project Scorpio is unlikely to significantly outmuscle that setup.
Drop that 4K resolution down to 1080p, however, and the GTX 1070 comes into its own, achieving plus-60fps rendering even with maxed-out graphical settings. At 1440p — a favorite resolution among PC gamers — the Scorpio is likely to shine, offering solid frame rates and a significant improvement in fidelity over 1080p when stretched over a large 4K TV.
We don’t know enough about Scorpio yet to make definitive statements. Its memory bandwidth (and the 10 to 12GB of video memory it implies) is large and will help out with 4K. Developers can optimize for Scorpio more than they can for individual PC setups, although they’ll also have to be targeting the vanilla Xbox One concurrently. But even the GTX 1080, a $600, 9-teraflop card, struggles with frame rates at 4K.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Project Scorpio launch with the option to play some games at 4K30. Microsoft could even decree that all games need to hit that target. But even if it does, it’s far more likely that performance-obsessed gamers — the obvious target market for Microsoft’s new console — will want 60fps games at the highest fidelity possible. Rendering at 1440p and similar resolutions will still offer noticeable improvements on a 4K TV set. And if you have a 1080p set, you’re going to see 60fps as well as some additional graphical accoutrements.
So what?
Until Scorpio is released, Sony can safely claim that the PS4 Pro will offer the best-looking console games ever. Games that dynamically scale, or use the checkerboard process to upscale, will look better than their current-gen counterparts. Games that run at 1080p will be able to perform at a consistently higher level than they do on the PS4. We should never again see a 1080p title dropping below 30fps, and indeed, the vast majority should run at 60fps. That’s fantastic news.
It’s good that Sony and Microsoft are updating their consoles to support 4K TVs, which have moved from niche, expensive products to practically the norm on electronic store shelves. Lots of gamers — many of them the companies’ most fervent supporters — already have 4K sets, and within the next few years it’s probable that millions will be investing in 4K.
What’s not good is selling gamers on the promise of “4K gaming.” Console gamers were sold the lie of 1080p gaming for many years, and developers’ desire to satiate fans — who only wanted 1080p gaming because they were promised it — has resulted in high-resolution, low-performance gaming becoming the norm.
Sony needs to be up front about the PS4 Pro’s (lack of) 4K capabilities
As someone with a 1080p TV and no intention to upgrade to 4K in the immediate future, I’m genuinely excited about both consoles. But I wish we could get a clear idea of what they can and can’t do. With the PS4 Pro, Sony needs to be up front about the console’s (lack of) 4K capabilities.
It’s fine if your console can’t do 4K gaming with any regularity, but don’t say that “PS4 games deliver unprecedented visual precision, such as 4K quality resolution to give remarkable clarity down to the tiniest detail” on your website. Be honest. Tell gamers that their games will look and play better on both 1080p TVs and 4K TVs. Tell them this is the best they’ll get on a console right now. They’ll still buy the thing.
Microsoft has some time to think. Project Scorpio isn’t likely to be unveiled properly until E3 next year. Unless it truly believes that games running at 4K will be the norm — and, hey, maybe it can somehow pull off 4K30 across the board — it should shy away from that marketing spiel.
Given the significant performance increase between the PS4 Pro and Scorpio, it should stick with a far simpler line: “No matter what TV you own, games will look and perform better on our console than a PS4 Pro.” Add in VR and (almost certainly) UHD Blu-ray support and that’s likely a winning formula, provided the price is right, of course.
What happened at Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro event
Sony’s PlayStation event didn’t have a ton of surprises, but still — any time you get two new flavors of the PS4, it’s worth paying attention. In the afterglow of today’s announcements, senior editors Devindra Hardawar and Nathan Ingraham break down the good and bad of what Sony announced. The PS4 Slim is almost exactly what we expected: a cheaper and smaller version of the existing PS4. But Sony surprised us a bit by having a reasonable $399 price point and November 10th release date for its more powerful PS4 Pro console. Both new PS4 consoles will be in gamers’ hands before long, so get caught up on what you need to know here.
PS4 Pro will take UHD screenshots and broadcast 1080p video
In addition to running games at higher resolution, the PlayStation 4 Pro will also take bigger and more detailed screenshots as well. Hitting the Share button on the controller will grab a 4K-sized image of whatever is on-screen at that moment according to Polygon.
Earlier today, the console’s FAQ page listed 1080p Remote Play and 1080p Share Play (and 5GHz WiFi!). That’s a definite improvement over 720p and 30 FPS on previous hardware, but there are a few caveats here. Polygon reports that Dailymotion and YouTube videos will cap out at 60 FPS. Twitch broadcasts, on the other hand, have a hard stop at 1080p and 30 FPS.
So, just because the Pro can output higher resolution video and frame rates doesn’t mean that your favorite video service of choice is ready for them just yet. At least not without additional hardware like a video capture card. If you’re expecting that to change with Microsoft’s high-end Project Scorpio when it launches late next year, you might want to dial those hopes back a touch too.
Source: Sony, Polygon
Sony brought new PS4 accessories too
Sony didn’t talk about it much during today’s PlayStation Meeting event, but the reworked DualShock 4 (CUH-ZCT2) spotted in earlier leaks is real. The touchpad is a bit see through, allowing that line on the top to display whatever color the lightbar is showing — all the better for games that take advantage of its color-changing abilities.
Also, it’s able to send data back and forth to the PS4 over USB in addition to its Bluetooth connection for those times when wireless just isn’t working — a trick the Xbox One’s controller has had since launch. It will be available individually this fall for $59/£54/€59 and no, it does not have a larger battery.
There’s also a new Platinum Wireless headset coming for $159 with “premium” construction and materials, all ready to work with the PS VR headset. A new PlayStation Camera (CUH-ZEY2) has the same features in a cylindrical design that is easier to adjust for $59, while a new vertical stand is built for the PS4 Pro and new slimmer PS4.
Source: SIE
The Aftermath: Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro event
For an hour-long media event, Sony packed a ton of new info into 60 minutes. Release date and prices for both the PlayStation 4 Slim and PS4 Pro, tons of HDR footage from upcoming games and even a few bits about how the PS4 Pro would better handle PlayStation VR games. That’s on top of perhaps the biggest announcement of the keynote: All 40,000+ PS4s will get an update that adds HDR video capability. And that’s just the beginning.
The PlayStation 4 Pro vs. the original PS4: What’s changed?
With only three years since the release of the PlayStation 4, Sony isn’t quite ready to give us a completely new console. But while it did unveil a new slim redesign, there’s also the PlayStation 4 Pro: Not quite 4K gaming, but the new HDR looks good enough to give players a taste of the next generation. We’ve pitted the stats of the new systems up against the OG PS4 to see how far we’ve come in the past few years.
PlayStation 4 Pro
PlayStation 4 Slim
PlayStation 4 (2013)
Price
$399
$299
starts at $349 (originally $399)
Dimensions
295 x 327 x 55mm (11.61 x 12.87 x 2.17 inches)
265 x 288 x 39mm (10.43 x 11.34 x 1.54 inches)
275.1 x 305.1 x 53.1mm (10.83 x 12.01 x 2.09 inches)
Weight
3.3kg (7.28 pounds)
2.1kg (4.63 pounds)
2.8kg (6.17 pounds)
Output resolution
480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p, 4K (video only), HDR
480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p, 4K (video only)
480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p, 4K (video only)
CPU
AMD Jaguar x86-64, 8-core
AMD Jaguar x86-64, 8-core
AMD Jaguar x86-64, 8-core
GPU
AMD Radeon, 4.20 TFLOP
AMD Radeon, 1.84 TFLOP
AMD Radeon, 1.84 TFLOP
RAM
8GB
8GB
8GB
Internal storage
1TB
500GB / 1TB
500GB / 1TB
Physical media
Blu-ray, DVD
Blu-ray, DVD
Blu-ray, DVD
WiFi
802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
802.11 a/b/g/n/ac
802.11 b/g/n
Wired network
10/100/1000 Ethernet
10/100/1000 Ethernet
10/100/1000 Ethernet
Bluetooth
v4.0
v4.0
v2.1
Ports
USB 3.0 (x3), HDMI 2.0a, S/PDIF
USB 3.0 (x2), HDMI 2.0a
USB 3.0 (x2), HDMI 1.4, S/PDIF
Controller
DualShock 4
DualShock 4
DualShock 4
While we won’t have a full review until the systems are released in the coming weeks, stay tuned for further impressions of the PS4 Pro here on Engadget.
Find all the news from Sony’s big PlayStation event right here.
The PS4 Slim hits shelves on September 15th for $300
Sony isn’t done with the PlayStation 4. The company today revealed the PS4 Slim, a thinner version of its latest console that’s been lurking around the rumor mill for months now. The Slim lands on September 15th for $300/£259.
The PS4 Slim features all the guts of a standard PS4 plus a few cosmetic and convenience upgrades, including a lightbar at the top, more space between the front-facing USB ports and the removal of the optical port. The console is about 30 percent smaller than the standard PS4, which came out in 2013, and it plays all existing PS4 games.
We recently re-reviewed the PS4 and found it to be “the best console experience money can buy,” which bodes well for the PS4 Slim — and the PS4 Pro (formerly the Neo), a new and more powerful version of Sony’s latest console.
Find all the news from Sony’s big PlayStation event right here.
Sony’s 4K game console is called PlayStation 4 Pro
Sony’s 4K PlayStation 4 upgrade has been something of an open secret since before E3, but today the company officially unveiled its high end game console. It’s called PlayStation 4 Pro — and it’ll be available on November 10th for $399/£349. It boasts an upgraded, x86-64 “Jaguar” AMD CPU with 8 cores, a 4.2 teraflop AMD Radeon GPU, three USB ports and a 1TB HDD. Sony say’s it’s twice as fast as the regular PS4, and, of course, it’s designed specifically for UHD TVs and PlayStation VR.
PlayStation’s Andrew House says the refresh has been a long time coming. “Display technology offers so much potential if there is content to leverage what’s now possible,” he said. “With PlayStation 4, we’re pretty much maxing out what 1080p TVs can do with most games.” Hence, the creation of the PS4 Pro. This is a console designed for the kind of 4K resolutions and HDR that so-called “conventional TVs” simply can’t display. So, what does a 4K PlayStation 4 game look like? Sony brought examples.
PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerny used footage from Rise of the Tomb Raider, Insomniac’s upcoming Spider-Man game and Watch Dogs 2 to show how the upgraded console can give exiting games a huge visual shot in the arm. One demo showed mountain top view of a city blown out on a typical TV, but lush with color on an HDR display powered by the PlayStation Pro. A quick look at Day’s Gone with and without HDR features revealed a scene with a much wider color range and more realistic shadows.
“But you don’t need a 4K TV or HDR TV to experience the benefit of PS4 pro,” Cerny explained. Even on a standard HD TV, games will look better on the PlayStation 4 Pro. Super-sampling and advanced anti-aliasing will take the jagged edge off of games that are pushing the standard hardware to its limits. Even at 1080p, games will feature better reflections and brighter colors. Older titles like Paragon, Infamous First Light and Shadow of Mordor are all scheduled to receive high-fidelity graphics patches too, in what Cerny calls “forward compatibility.”
Naturally, the PlayStation Pro will be a boon for consumers who buy into PSVR this October: Sony says virtual reality games played on the new hardware could potentially look crisper, have more detailed special effects and, best of all, run at higher framerates. Specifically, Cerny said FarPoint, Sony’s upcoming VR shooter, will feature about twice as much detail on the PS4 Pro vs the standard hardware.
Finally, Sony announced that 4K and HDR video content will be available on the upgraded console as well, specifically calling out a partnership with Netflix to develop a 4K streaming app for the PlayStation 4 Pro.
As the event wrapped up, House returned to reveal the new PlayStation line up: a slimmer PS4 for a cool $299, or a thicker, more powerful PlayStation 4 Pro for $399. That slimmer PS4 will hit stores next week — but folks with 4K televisions at home will have to wait until November 10th for the Pro. Still, that’s a lot sooner than Microsoft’s Project Scorpio is set to debut. And no, Microsoft, the Xbox One S isn’t the same thing.
Sony will upgrade all PS4s with HDR
At today’s announcement of two new PlayStation 4 consoles, Sony had news for existing owners too: a firmware update will make every PS4 (going back to the launch models) ready for HDR video. There weren’t a lot of specifics on what exactly what your console will support, but we’ll find out more info as it becomes available. Sony showed off some sweet gaming demos with the PS4 Pro showing what HDR can do, but we’ll have to see how well older hardware supports the feature, or if it’s only for video streams.
Just announced: every PS4 will be HDR compatible
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) September 7, 2016
HDR is coming to all 40 million existing #PS4 users via a firmware update next week. Woo! #PlayStationMeeting
— PlayStation Europe (@PlayStationEU) September 7, 2016
Of course, the big takeaway Sony is likely looking for is that gamers won’t need to buy a new console for demo material. You’ll still need a new HDR-ready TV, but if it means you don’t also buy an Xbox One S then it helps keep more gamers on the PlayStation side of the line.
Update: The press release confirms HDR support for all PlayStation 4s, but does not go into any further detail about what games or movies that may impact.
Find all the news from Sony’s big PlayStation event right here.
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