PlayStation 4 Pro Reviews

Got a wild hair and redid my entertainment room last night in prep for the Pro. Took everything down, did a little re-arranging, dusted and re-tied all cables. Got Friday off from work, too.

TWO MORE DAYS.
 
Checkerboard Render said:
...except that doesn't show the cost to 'make it compatible" at all. It shows the man hours needed to implement checkerboard rendering - and Cerney is not even talking about re-tooling existing games, he's talking about the time to implement checkerboard rendering in a game currently in development as opposed to just rendering natively or simple upscaling (if it were that simple, then how come UC4 - helmed by some of the most experienced and talented PS4 developers - doesn't use it in their PS4 pro patch?). You're confusing two different things.

That says absolutely nothing about the cost to take an existing game and have it go through the QA process of running on substantially different hardware. For that, Cerney spoke about it directly as the quote I provided:



In short:" We tested the sceneario of running games unmodified, and enough fucked up that we went with this method of downlocking and disabling CU's."
Click to expand...


Cerny says devs shouldn’t expect to have to invest a lot of extra effort into modifying their games to take advantage of the Pro’s enhanced capabilities; minimizing that investment was, in fact, a core goal of the console’s design.

“As a mid-generation release, we knew that whatever we did needed to require minimal effort by the developers,” he said. “ In general, our target was to keep the work needed for PS4 Pro support to a fraction of a percent of the overall effort of creating a game. I believe we have achieved that target.”

Edit: gnight
 
Mr Ice Chillin said:
Heres another Battlefield 1 comparison video where the reviewer says the support for Pro is already on the disc.

In the comments he said HDR is missing but the jump in resolution and textures is present on the disc.

It actually kinda makes sense because Titanfall is the same way and they are both EA Games. I just hope the FPS for online multiplayer improved...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkT-5IVnr7c
Click to expand...

New thread worthy?
 
Mr Ice Chillin said:
Heres another Battlefield 1 comparison video where the reviewer says the support for Pro is already on the disc.

In the comments he said HDR is missing but the jump in resolution and textures is present on the disc.

It actually kinda makes sense because Titanfall is the same way and they are both EA Games. I just hope the FPS for online multiplayer improved...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkT-5IVnr7c
Click to expand...

Videos like these are useless to show the differences of Pro vs OG PS4. Honestly watching on my regular monitor, its hard to see much difference. And that's the problem. It needs to be seen on a proper 4K-HDR TV to really see how much better it looks.
 
Mr Ice Chillin said:
Heres another Battlefield 1 comparison video where the reviewer says the support for Pro is already on the disc.

In the comments he said HDR is missing but the jump in resolution and textures is present on the disc.

It actually kinda makes sense because Titanfall is the same way and they are both EA Games. I just hope the FPS for online multiplayer improved...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkT-5IVnr7c
Click to expand...

All the sites with the Pro say it isn't available, except 1. And Dice I think have been particularly quiet, no?

You can't use that video for anything becuase its on youtube so lolcompression.

It seems far more likely to me that his Pro is simply upscaling from 1080.
 
Jacksinthe said:
I've spent more time playing my game than I have spent developing it. We are releasing on 2 platforms.

We are not talking about Pro optimization. We are talking about NON-pro optimized games made for OG PS4 hardware having access to DIFFERENT, non-OG hardware.

What happened, you ask? You aren't following along, that's what happened.
Click to expand...

As a fellow dev, I feel you. Love it when we pull back the curtain a bit to show how games are actually made and get shit on.

jabberwocker said:
Cerny says devs shouldn’t expect to have to invest a lot of extra effort into modifying their games to take advantage of the Pro’s enhanced capabilities; minimizing that investment was, in fact, a core goal of the console’s design.
Click to expand...

Right, but it's still at minimum a few programmers' time - anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months - to do that optimization and then you have to get QA people to test it which again isn't super quick. For a quick and dirty patch (Uncharted 4), that's probably a 2 week investment. For a patch done right (Rise of the Tomb Raider) that's closer to the 2 month mark.

HOWEVER, that is still fairly minimal, relative to how long it takes to develop most parts of a game. Typically I'd say most studios will probably allot it 2 SCRUM cycles, 1 for programming and 1 for QA.

Checkerboard Render said:
And ffs, pointing to PC games as any standard of game testing?! They don't test every scenario of course, which is why PC Performance threads are such a clusterfuck. Consoles can't have that level of compatibility - they actually have to work for 99.9% of the players.
Click to expand...

If the PC gamers on here knew how little optimization time and testing the majority of PC ports of AAA games get... *sad trombone noise*
 
jabberwocker said:
“As a mid-generation release, we knew that whatever we did needed to require minimal effort by the developers,” he said. “ In general, our target was to keep the work needed for PS4 Pro support to a fraction of a percent of the overall effort of CREATING a game. I believe we have achieved that target.”

Edit: gnight
Click to expand...
You're not even reading your own quotes. Jesus christ.

I mean, he directly addresses the issue of allowing games to run on the base hardware without modification. You don't have to read anything into it, infer some meaning - he states it very plainly on the very issue in contention - we experimented with it, and so we went with our downclocking method as it messes too much up otherwise. You keep harping back to Cerney discussing the cost of implementing checkerboard as an overall cost of game development in some desperate attempt to simply admit you may not understand the hurdles involved. It's rather pathetic.
 
TrojanBlade said:
Videos like these are useless to show the differences of Pro vs OG PS4. Honestly watching on my regular monitor, its hard to see much difference. And that's the problem. It needs to be seen on a proper 4K-HDR TV to really see how much better it looks.
Click to expand...
TBF you wouldn't see the difference even if it was supersampled 1080p
Even 4k video outside resolution only touches what 1080p looks like, the betrayed is just too low.
 
icespide said:
UHD blu-ray, 4k game scaling, performance boosts without patches, $300. the choice is clear
Click to expand...

Indeed it is. Picking up my PS4 Pro Thursday morning. Excite. I already have a PC if I want to play xbox one games in 4k and performance boosts without patches.
 
Question?
If I view a 4k image on a 1080p display would that represent what supersampled 1080p is like?
 
Jacksinthe said:
Do you have any clue how many people it takes to test a single game before gold? Do you even know what testers have to do?

Do you honestly think a handful of people are going to run into every wall, shoot every wall, crouch in front of every wall, prone in front of every wall, cast every spell in front of every wall, try each menu option in front of every wall, try every conceivable action in front of every wall then repeat it for doors, floors, moving platforms, yada yada yada?
Click to expand...
I'm a big proponent of Sony whitelisting at least some games. First of all, they do this kind of thing already anyway when they release new hardware with even remotely significant motherboard changes. They did it for literally every PS2 game and provided a list of games incompatible with a certain PS2 slim model.
Secondly, you would only realistically need to do spot checks in a select few games which people demand the most. Lets face it, when it comes to a game that's so reliant on perfect clock timing, it's going to crash or misbehave badly pretty much right away. They wouldn't need to test weird edge case scenarios to uncover potential problems. And if worried about those scenarios, they could simply provide an option for those white listed games to run in an up-clocked mode and not default into that mode. Lastly, they could release a beta firmware and ask people to do some testing. They'd have an army of incredibly dedicated people testing this for absolutely free.

I really think they will do this eventually, but not right now, as doing this would de-incentivize developers from making a proper patch.
 
Lord Error said:
I'm a big proponent of Sony whitelisting at least some games. First of all, they do this kind of thing already anyway when they release new hardware with even remotely significant motherboard changes. They did it for literally every PS2 game and provided a list of games incompatible with a certain PS2 slim model.
Secondly, you would only really need to do a spot checks in a select few games. Lets face it, when it comes to a game that's so reliant on perfect clock timing, it's going to crash or misbehave badly pretty much right away. The wouldn't need to test weird edge case scenarios. If if worried about those scenarios, they could simply provide an option for those white listed games to run in an up-clocked mode and not default into that mode. Lastly, they could release a beta firmware and ask people to do some testing. They'd have an army of incredibly dedicated people testing this for absolutely free.
Click to expand...

it all really comes down to this: the potential benefit of this is not worth the time and financial investment it would require to get it done when they can efficiently guarantee compatibility with next to no effort (downclocking the GPU)

it's certainly valid to be upset about this fact, but its the truth
 
icespide said:
it all really comes down to this: the potential benefit of this is not worth the time and financial investment it would require to get it done when they can efficiently guarantee compatibility with next to no effort (downclocking the GPU)

it's certainly valid to be upset about this fact, but its the truth
Click to expand...
Releasing beta firmware and asking people to do testing would cost them literally nothing. They release updates with stuff no one cares about all the time anyway. They could let the firmware team do something everyone would love to see happen.
 
Mr Ice Chillin said:
Heres another Battlefield 1 comparison video where the reviewer says the support for Pro is already on the disc.

In the comments he said HDR is missing but the jump in resolution and textures is present on the disc.

It actually kinda makes sense because Titanfall is the same way and they are both EA Games. I just hope the FPS for online multiplayer improved...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkT-5IVnr7c
Click to expand...

They could just upload to 2 screenshots.

These split view comparison videos are no good though. They should crop the left side of each video so we at least get a side by side like for like comparison and also they're out of sync mostly and of course youtube compression.
 
I ended up going with Ratchet and Clank and Uncharted 4. No need for Tomb Raider since I've already played that in 4k on my PC.

Looking forward to Friday.
 
chromatic9 said:
They could just upload to 2 screenshots.

These split view comparison videos are no good though. They should crop the left side of each video so we at least get a side by side like for like comparison and also they're out of sync mostly and of course youtube compression.
Click to expand...

Agreed.

Since my connection is too shite to stream the 4k video, I'm downloading it, only another 28 minutes to go. I'm still not expecting to see anything but I'll have a look
 
icespide said:
objectively not true
Click to expand...
You are dragging this down into arguing semantics. Of course *someone* cares about printer support or photo editor or whatever, but I believe a benefit from this particular feature would far outweigh an investment firmware team would put into it. It would be a big selling point for their new hardware.
 
Taking the plunge:

The Backup and Restore functionality, are there any gotchas that I need to look out for? What does it backup? (I'm looking to mainly keep PT at this point). Do I need a fresh drive or does it create a image file on the existing drive?
 
Lord Error said:
Lets face it, when it comes to a game that's so reliant on perfect clock timing, it's going to crash or misbehave badly pretty much right away.
Click to expand...
And you know this due to...?

Dark Souls for example would only show problems with 60fps when descending some ladders.

Look, even if only 2% of games exhibited issues, do you not understand the shitstorm that would create when you're introducing a new console that's not designed to completely replacing the existing one? All you would hear from the press is that "The PS4 Pro may not work with your games!" It doesn't matter if it was fewer than 10 games in total, as soon as you introduce the slightest hint of compatibility issues it would be a PR disaster.

Again, a title like UC4, with arguably the most talented PS4 development team around and likely one with the most access to the hardware for the longest time, still had to release a patch to get it to take advantage of the Pro, and they couldn't even do checkerboard rendering. It went from 900p to 1080p in multiplayer, and from 1080p to 1440p in single player, with no change in framerate.

That's the creme-de-la-creme of PS4 developers with the most immediate access to Sony engineers.

But really, it's easy to make games run unmodified with benefits. I know because I really want it to be so.
 
Lifejumper said:
Why is DICE keeping quiet about the pro patch? Makes no fucking sense.
Click to expand...


It actually makes a lot of sense. It's shitty on EA's part but it makes sense that they wouldn't want to promote a version of the game that makes the just released console versions look like shit (fps in multi-player wise).
 
What will happen if I choose 4k in the PlayStation video settings and I got a 1080p ? Will I get a down sampled output or black screen ?
 
Inceptional said:
It actually makes a lot of sense. It's shitty on EA's part but it makes sense that they wouldn't want to promote a version of the game that makes the just released console versions look like shit (fps in multi-player wise).
Click to expand...

Actually I think it's because both games Titan fall and bf1 are being marketed for xbox one . So EA can't really promote how much better the game will look on pro. But hey common sense isn't allowed in GAF sometimes (not talking about you inceptional. Was just following up the conversation)
 
Checkerboard Render said:
And you know this due to...?

Dark Souls for example would only show problems with 60fps and descending some ladders.

Again, a title like UC4, with arguably the most talented PS4 development team around and likely one with the most access to the hardware for the longest time, still had to release a patch to get it to take advantage of the Pro, and they couldn't even do checkerboard rendering. It went from 900p to 1080p in multiplayer, and from 1080p to 1440p in single player, with no change in framerate.

That's the creme-de-la-creme of PS4 developers with the most immediate access to Sony engineers.

But really, it's easy to make games run unmodified with benefits. I know because I really want it to be so.
Click to expand...

I bet some issues crop up with async compute and gpgpu stuff. Like IIRC Resogun is supposed to only use gpgpu and little/no cpu, and The Tomorrow Children is similar I think

As for UC4, I'm assuming what they have now is just a quick and dirty compatibility patch, we will see MUCH different results later on as DLC comes out. TLOU was probably relatively easy compared to the trickery they have in store for uc4, they are going to blow the roof off with Pro, undoubtedly
 
//DEVIL// said:
What will happen if I choose 4k in the PlayStation video settings and I got a 1080p ? Will I get a down sampled output or black screen ?
Click to expand...

I would assume you get downsampled output, but i am not sure.

*EDIT*

Black screen it seems from the post above me.

My guess is that you either choose the 4K mode in the game settings themselves, or if a game only has one pro mode and that mode is higher resolution, then you will automatically have it downsampled to your screen
 
Checkerboard Render said:
And you know this due to...?

Dark Souls for example would only show problems with 60fps when descending some ladders.
Click to expand...
Even if I try to argue this against myself, and if the problems with games reliant of perfect hardware timing would only manifest in the most edge case scenarios (which goes against all the experience I have on the issue), just let the player take a risk, provide an option and a warning screen. Option would not be enabled by default. Only do so for a select few games that actually benefit from upclock, games that people want to see this applied to, and that they played for like an hour normally and found no problems.

Another option as I mention, recruit people to do this via beta testing. I think this would generate them surprising amount of goodwill, paradoxically, letting people work for free for them.

Now, it is entirely possible that PS4 games are all created in such a way that they simply would not work period if the clock changes even slightly. In that case, no need to put any effort into this. But I find that really hard to believe considering how flexible games tend to be nowadays.
 
I'm really struggling here whether to get a PS4 Pro or a GTX 1070. I just love the ease of console gaming but I have a decent steam library too hmmmmmmm.

Anyway I like what I'm seeing despite still being in 1080p land. Curious about FFXV
 
Fisty said:
As for UC4, I'm assuming what they have now is just a quick and dirty compatibility patch, we will see MUCH different results later on as DLC comes out. TLOU was probably relatively easy compared to the trickery they have in store for uc4, they are going to blow the roof off with Pro, undoubtedly
Click to expand...
I wouldn't be surprised and I hope so, but my point is that it underscores that just having a "whitelist" (or even perhaps a free-for-all) to allow games to run unmodified yet take advantage of the hardware changes transparently isn't apparently realistic when the most experienced PS4 developers produce such minimal changes themselves after a patch.

It doesn't mean it's a 'gargantuan' effort to get games to take advantage of the Pro in some fashion - but that 'some fashion' is a rather large variable. If it were really a simple checkflight list, a few days of QA and one programmer a couple of weeks, then I think we would see far more games with Pro patches now and implementing more advanced up-rendering techniques like checkerboarding. It would be just dumb from a business perspective not to if the effort was truly that minimal, you get lots of free exposure by the addition of your game in the list of Pro-enhanced titles and perhaps even a good chunk of YouTube screen time as DF and the like put your patch through its paces.
 
TehGoomba said:
What GPU do you have now?
Click to expand...
980ti and yes I know I probably should stick with that and get a PS4 pro. I just don't know about having to many platforms and very little time seems like a waste like I'm sure getting a 1070 would be since I have a 980 Ti.

Granted the lower power and better VR more VRAM etc are reasons why I'm considering it.
 
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