Thinking of buying a console

Kenoxabe · December 12, 2016

I'm thinking of buying one as well (PS4). Thing is, even though I don't have a 4k TV, I'm thinking of buying the PS4 Pro.. Or would the PS4 Slim be sufficient?

Ithanul · December 13, 2016

14 hours ago, ZakuII said:

I'm thinking of buying one as well (PS4). Thing is, even though I don't have a 4k TV, I'm thinking of buying the PS4 Pro.. Or would the PS4 Slim be sufficient?

Well, I read about The Last Guardian game, and that game is actually benefiting from the higher hardware in the Pro. Not sure about other games yet.

On the OG PS4 that game dips around the 20s or lower while on the PS4 Pro the game stays around 30FPS at 1080P.

http://www.polygon.com/2016/12/5/13843728/the-last-guardian-ps4-pro-tech-analysis

SteveGrabowski0 · December 13, 2016

15 hours ago, ZakuII said:

I'm thinking of buying one as well (PS4). Thing is, even though I don't have a 4k TV, I'm thinking of buying the PS4 Pro.. Or would the PS4 Slim be sufficient?

If you're thinking of the Slim and in the US, newegg has it right now for $230 with Uncharted 4. But that deal is supposed to be expiring in 5 hours. It was actually supposed to expire this morning (I bought mine last night), but they extended it through the day.

What @Ithanul said about The Last Guardian is absolutely true: The Last Guardian plays way cleaner on PS4 Pro than it does PS4, most likely because of the CPU overclock on the Pro (the Pro runs at 2.1 GHz vs the standard PS4, both original and slim, at 1.6 GHz).

Some games have high framerate modes on PS4 Pro at 1080p. For example, Rise of the Tomb Raider plays at 30 fps on PS4 but there is a mode that plays the early part of the game at 50-60 fps, though in challenging areas like the Geothermal Valley it's in the low 40s. The Infamous games can be run with an unlocked framerate also on PS4 Pro and they seem to be reasonably close to 60 fps if I remember right (check the channel of the Last Guardian video I posted above for the Infamous videos). COD Black Ops 3 can run at a higher framerate.

There are some games where the framerate is actually cleaner on the base PS4 than the Pro though: for instance, Watch Dogs 2 has a very steady 30 fps on base PS4 but can stutter a bit on PS4 Pro, probably due to it rendering at 1800p on PS4 Pro vs 1080p on PS4. For a while The Last of Us had a better framerate on base PS4 vs PS4 Pro, but the game has since been patched to have PS4 Pro perform the same at 1080p vs base PS4 while also getting upgraded shadows (it was originally rendering at 1800p on the Pro in this mode, but now renders at 1080p on a 1080p TV). In games where the studios get lazy and just render at a higher resolution when run on the Pro this could be a real problem.

For me though the Slim is much much better value because I'll be running my PS4 on a 1080p panel. I have never been that impressed with supersampling using my GTX 970, it still looks like 1080p to me when on a 1080p screen. So I don't care about the supersampling the PS4 Pro offers. And Uncharted 4 was one of the main reasons I even wanted a PS4, so getting it and the system for $230 when the PS4 Pro plus Uncharted 4 would cost me $460 made the decision easy. Another thing that made it easy for me is that I'll be using my PS4 for exclusives, and I expect Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studios games to be way better optimized for Playstation than EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, etc games that I'll be running on PC anyways. If you're thinking of getting the PS4 as your main gaming platform I think the Pro becomes a much more compelling option though. If you think you'll buy PSVR later on then getting the Pro is a no-brainer.