PS4 Pro Review

[Lil Frier]

I'm still torn on what my holiday purchase(s) will be. I wanted to get a PS4 Pro because I hate buying things as they're on their way out (in terms of tech, not usefulness), but with the vastly superior pricing on the Slim, I might have to pass on the Pro at almost twice the price (when bundling for BF is considered). That, and I really wish Sony did better console bundles. They seem to only have Uncharted 4, and I can't say I care about it at all.

On top of that, I still need a new TV. Similarly can't decide if I want to go on the higher end ($1,000 or so) or get one of these cheap, BF-only models that I know aren't good, but will be fine as a short-term replacement to my 42" LG from almost 9 years ago. If Sony had more things that I REALLY wanted on their platform, it might be an easier call, but right now, I can only think of 3-4 things I want to play.

 

[WhiteNoise]

Not sure. I'll check when I get home and see if I can find any info on that and let you know.

One thing I just thought of, did you enable the option for HDMI ULTRA HD Deep Color on the HDMI port?

That is what he missed I'm sure.

 

[zerocool84]

Battlefield 1 runs at 1800p on the pro and is scaled to 4K from there.

It may be me but even on my 1080p screen it looks better. Less jaggies. Probably super sampled

 

[cmdrdredd]

It may be me but even on my 1080p screen it looks better. Less jaggies. Probably super sampled

Right all the games on the pro down sample now. It's rendering above 1080p and then scaling down. Many games have an option for this. Infamous lets you pick between performance and higher resolution, last of us is native 4K 30fps or 1080p 60fps. Just for examples.

I'm liking it quite a bit so far. Infamous and ratchet & clank are super nice looking compared to the base PS4.

 

[Ackmed]

You were both right, missed turning on the HDR. I don't understand why it is set to off by default? Anyways, its under general settings on the TV and not screen where I thought it would be. So got it working, thanks! Transferring everything over took almost 4 hours, had like 370gb. It basically cloned my new PS4 from the old, logged into PSN and updated my games. I have Last of Us remasterd, Uncharted 4, BF1, and Overwatch I play a lot. Haven't really dug into them yet, but played Uncharted for a few. Immediately told me I had the option for HDR and asked if I wanted to enable it.

Don't mind the wires, just moved in and setting stuff up. Using a temp shelf for now.

 

[cmdrdredd]

You were both right, missed turning on the HDR. I don't understand why it is set to off by default? Anyways, its under general settings on the TV and not screen where I thought it would be. So got it working, thanks! Transferring everything over took almost 4 hours, had like 370gb. It basically cloned my new PS4 from the old, logged into PSN and updated my games. I have Last of Us remasterd, Uncharted 4, BF1, and Overwatch I play a lot. Haven't really dug into them yet, but played Uncharted for a few. Immediately told me I had the option for HDR and asked if I wanted to enable it.

Nice. I don't know why these options are off. Sony Tvs have HDMI Enhanced mode, Samsung has HDMI UHD Color and they are all off until you switch them on. The weird thing is that these options are not detrimental to SDR signals, I leave my setting on full time and it never causes any problems. That's what's weird, if it doesn't cause problems why not just have it on without the user needing to do it manually? All it does is tell the TV to accept 10 and 12bit color signals from the port. Why is this even a toggle? I can't figure that out. Over on AVS Forum there have been so many issues cleared up by this option being switched on.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I'm still torn on what my holiday purchase(s) will be. I wanted to get a PS4 Pro because I hate buying things as they're on their way out (in terms of tech, not usefulness), but with the vastly superior pricing on the Slim, I might have to pass on the Pro at almost twice the price (when bundling for BF is considered). That, and I really wish Sony did better console bundles. They seem to only have Uncharted 4, and I can't say I care about it at all.

I know what you mean. I want to get a PS4 for the exclusives and the most important game I'm getting it for, The Last of Us, actually plays better on the original than it does the pro at 1080p. Uncharted 4 is one of the games that I will 100% get though, so the PS4 Pro is effectively $160 more expensive than the PS4 Slim for me. But I'm worried I'll buy the Slim and then find out at least one of the three yet to be released games that I'm really looking forward to (Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Days Gone) has a 60 fps mode on the Pro or can't hold a steady 30 fps on the original PS4. I'll probably just buy the Pro but I'm going to be pissed if all I get is 1800p rendering at worse framerates out of those three games when they come out. I definitely don't want to be playing RDR2 at 20 fps like RDR1 could drop to on my XBox 360.

 

[Lil Frier]

The other thing about the Pro, for me (and this is really about the PS4 as a whole), is that there isn't a bundle that interests me. I don't care about Uncharted, especially if it's just giving me the 4th and I have to go buy the PS3 trilogy remaster to get the rest of the story. I want MLB The Show, Horizon, and Kingdom Hearts, with that $15 Black Friday MLB 16 likely the only thing I would play in the near-future. Sony's exclusives just don't grab my attention that often. I wouldn't worry too hard about those frame issues, though, as I would expect Sony devs to resolve that, somehow.

It's just hard to justify a $400 Pro for what is currently a single game (with 3-4 known ones on the way), versus a $250 Slim with bundles stuff to lower the price to about $200. If I don't end up getting an HDR TV, it makes the Pro even less useful for me.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I know what you mean. I want to get a PS4 for the exclusives and the most important game I'm getting it for, The Last of Us, actually plays better on the original than it does the pro at 1080p. Uncharted 4 is one of the games that I will 100% get though, so the PS4 Pro is effectively $160 more expensive than the PS4 Slim for me. But I'm worried I'll buy the Slim and then find out at least one of the three yet to be released games that I'm really looking forward to (Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Days Gone) has a 60 fps mode on the Pro or can't hold a steady 30 fps on the original PS4. I'll probably just buy the Pro but I'm going to be pissed if all I get is 1800p rendering at worse framerates out of those three games when they come out. I definitely don't want to be playing RDR2 at 20 fps like RDR1 could drop to on my XBox 360.

You do realize Last of Us running at 1400p, scales to 4K, then down samples to 1080p on the pro right? The game looks better on the pro even at 1080p. That's the only reason there is any minor drops from 60fps at all. Not only that but any slowdown there may be is very, very minor and I would probably never know about it if I didn't see a video that purposely pointed it out. It's like zooming in on a blade of grass to count jagged edges then declare one version sucks cause it has 2 extra jaggies lol. I expect new release games to leverage the pro much better though.

I would make my recommendation like this.

You have PS4 and 4K hdr tv? Think about the pro if you have the extra cash

You have no PS4? Get the pro for the better visuals in games unless price is a deciding factor. I mean if you absolutely cannot afford $400 plus games then don't put yourself in the hole to get it.

You have no PS4 but need optical? Slim has no optical output so you have to get pro unfortunately.

You have PS4 and 1080p tv? Don't upgrade

So basically if you don't have a PS4 get the pro unless you are limited on cost and if you have one don't upgrade unless you have an hdr tv. I know a lot of people personally who are looking at consoles for xmas but are not really interested in $400. For them price does factor in big. For then it may be beneficial to take a bundle with a game or two. At the very least to alleviate some of the burden from the wallet in terms of buying software. Opening a new console and having no games is no good and only having one game is not much fun. So being able to get a free game and then buy a couple more for the same money is appealing. I definitely see that.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

You do realize Last of Us running at 1400p, scales to 4K, then down samples to 1080p on the pro right? The game looks better on the pro even at 1080p. That's the only reason there is any minor drops from 60fps at all. Not only that but any slowdown there may be is very, very minor and I would probably never know about it if I didn't see a video that purposely pointed it out. It's like zooming in on a blade of grass to count jagged edges then declare one version sucks cause it has 2 extra jaggies lol. I expect new release games to leverage the pro much better though.

They look like worse drops than the PS4 original. I'm really sensitive to framerate though, I can easily notice drops into the low 50s when I'm gaming. High 50s I'd never notice without a frame counter being shown though.

I would make my recommendation like this.

You have PS4 and 4K hdr tv? Think about the pro if you have the extra cash

You have no PS4? Get the pro for the better visuals in games unless price is a deciding factor. I mean if you absolutely cannot afford $400 plus games then don't put yourself in the hole to get it.

I don't have a PS4 and I'd be running it at 1080p. Price isn't a gamebreaker but it always matters: $160 is still a good chunk of change.

You have no PS4 but need optical? Slim has no optical output so you have to get pro unfortunately.

Sound is going to be a pain in the ass regardless since I'll need to convert it to analog so I can sent it into the line-in for my computer (I want to play on my monitor and use my 2.1 speakers I have connected to my PC). I don't want to spend $90 on a sound card with a digital optical input, so I'll probably need to go with some form of DAC, HDMI extractor, or perhaps one of the USB to 3.5 mm audio jacks.

So basically if you don't have a PS4 get the pro unless you are limited on cost and if you have one don't upgrade unless you have an hdr tv. I know a lot of people personally who are looking at consoles for xmas but are not really interested in $400. For them price does factor in big. For then it may be beneficial to take a bundle with a game or two. At the very least to alleviate some of the burden from the wallet in terms of buying software. Opening a new console and having no games is no good and only having one game is not much fun. So being able to get a free game and then buy a couple more for the same money is appealing. I definitely see that.

I'm definitely leaning Pro, especially since all but one of the games I want to buy right now are $20 (The Last of Us, Uncharted Nathan Drake Collection, Bloodborne, God of War 3) and the only full price game I'm looking at is Uncharted 4 (though I might pick up Horizon Zero Dawn in February too). Though all those games run great on the original PS4. It's frustrating they just want to render at 1800p and downsample when you're running 1080p though. Surely some form of temporal anti-aliasing to get rid of the marching ant effect would be much less computationally intensive vs rendering at almost 280% of the resolution lots of people will be gaming on.

I'll probably wait to see what all the holiday game releases look like before making a final call. Are there many games where the base PS4 struggles to hit a locked 30 fps? I hate a variable frame rate unless it's really close to 60 fps.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I should also add I'd be getting a Playstation for only exclusives, which is another reason the $160 cheaper system looks appealing. For multiplatform games I'm pretty much always going PC unless the PC version is just a complete abortion like Arkham Knight at launch or PES 2017 with its XBox 360 level graphics on PC.

 

[Lil Frier]

For me, it's not really a question of "can I afford it?" or "can I afford more games picking the Slim?" Looking at the price gaps has me asking "does Sony WANT me to buy the Pro?" Part of me flat-out wants the better-specced hardware that will stutter less at the same resolution, or run at a higher resolution and support 4K/HDR.

The other part of me looks at how much extra Sony is charging for that better hardware, and thinks it's not worth it. There's currently just a single game on PS4 I intend to get, MLB 16 The Show, since it's $15 during BF (I wouldn't get it at $30-40 with the season over). Other than it, I'll probably be without games until KH 2.8 in January, which I might not want until KH 1.5 and 2.5 re-release in March. Horizon in February and MLB 17 in likely March will fit in for me as well. Beyond March, there isn't anything Sony's catching my eye with, until the release dateless Detroit: Become Human.

I want the Pro. I really do. I can afford it. I'm just bad at convincing myself to spend money, let alone $200 for a moderate spec bump.

 

[Lil Frier]

I'm definitely leaning Pro, especially since all but one of the games I want to buy right now are $20 (The Last of Us, Uncharted Nathan Drake Collection, Bloodborne, God of War 3) and the only full price game I'm looking at is Uncharted 4 (though I might pick up Horizon Zero Dawn in February too).

Don't forget to watch for Black Friday sales. All of those games you mentioned, except Uncharted 4, will be $15 at Best Buy during BF. TLoU will actually be $10 at GameStop as well.

 

[Xed]

How loud is all of your blu-ray drives? Mine is loud but worse is the high pitched migraine inducing tone. When it finally stops spinning the pro itself is much quieter than my launch ps4 was. Hoping I just have a dud since even though it's only a couple of minutes it makes me want to throw it out of the window.

 

[Anubis]

besides initial spinup i never notice it, and TBH the PS3/4/Pro is no louder then any other disk drive i have ever used

if it bothers you, just go 100% digital

 

[WhiteNoise]

Hmmm The drive doesn't seem loud to me. I've never thought about it so that tells me it is acceptable.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

And now Watch Dogs 2 is performing worse on PS4 Pro than the original PS4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTSDGkH8flA

Why are devs stubbornly rendering at 1800p for people using 1080p screens? I'd much rather have the locked 30 fps than the over the top supersampling. If I had a 4k screen that's different, but this console was supposed to be better than the old one for 1080p too.

Any recommendations for an HDMI audio extractor so I can run the PS4 Slim audio into the analog line in on my PC? Since there is no optical port I can't just use a DAC like you could with PS4 Pro.

 

[WhiteNoise]

I'm sure a patch or three will solve any issues with the ps4 pro.

 

[cmdrdredd]

How loud is all of your blu-ray drives? Mine is loud but worse is the high pitched migraine inducing tone. When it finally stops spinning the pro itself is much quieter than my launch ps4 was. Hoping I just have a dud since even though it's only a couple of minutes it makes me want to throw it out of the window.

It seems no better or worse than either my launch pa4 or my glacier white PS4.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Yeah I think developers are selling graphics rather than performance. It doesn't seem like every game though so it tells me that some developers are doing it right like for battlefield and titanfall which run just as well even though they are rendering higher resolution. I'd call it a developer issue rather than a PS4 issue.

The reason I say they are selling graphics is when insomniac was called out for ratchet & clank being 30fps and they responded that they found that on previous games that were 60fps nobody gave them kudos for it. Instead they had people calling out the graphics for not being at a certain level. So they stopped pushing for 60fps and decided they should just make a better looking game that runs at 30fps since people don't seem to care when their titles were 60fps.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Yeah I think developers are selling graphics rather than performance. It doesn't seem like every game though so it tells me that some developers are doing it right like for battlefield and titanfall which run just as well even though they are rendering higher resolution. I'd call it a developer issue rather than a PS4 issue.

I think it's fair to call it a PS4 issue since Sony said no game should perform worse on PS4 Pro than base PS4. Every game that gets released on PS4 Pro has to satisfy a long list of TRC requirements that Sony's QA team checks before they give the publisher the green light to sell a game. These Pro versions of games like The Last of Us and Watch Dogs 2 should have never gotten certification from Sony's QA.

 

[purbeast0]

Were people really expecting things to work as Sony promised them to work? That just isn't what history has proven us to be true.

And we are nerds on a tech forum discussing this. Imagine Joe Shmoe or his parents, who is going into Gamestop to buy a console and asking the dweebs that work there what to buy.

This is just another reason why having multiple different hardware versions for the same consoles was never and will never be a good idea. I definitely see a console crash coming in the not to distant future.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I think it's fair to call it a PS4 issue since Sony said no game should perform worse on PS4 Pro than base PS4. Every game that gets released on PS4 Pro has to satisfy a long list of TRC requirements that Sony's QA team checks before they give the publisher the green light to sell a game. These Pro versions of games like The Last of Us and Watch Dogs 2 should have never gotten certification from Sony's QA.

Well I added a blurb about this to my previous post. Insomniac used to make all their games run 60fps but they found that reviewers were calling them out for how the game looked instead of praising the frame rate. So they decided that graphics should come first.

As I said before, battlefield, titanfall, and a slew of other titles render above 1080p but still run at proper frame rates. It's not sony's fault Ubisoft sucks. Remember all the issues assassin's creed had with stuttering and low frame rate? Other studios don't seem to have much of a problem.

Like pure beast said the average joe doesn't know there is any slowdown, all they see is a sharper picture.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Well I added a blurb about this to my previous post. Insomniac used to make all their games run 60fps but they found that reviewers were calling them out for how the game looked instead of praising the frame rate. So they decided that graphics should come first.

As I said before, battlefield, titanfall, and a slew of other titles render above 1080p but still run at proper frame rates. It's not sony's fault Ubisoft sucks. Remember all the issues assassin's creed had with stuttering and low frame rate? Other studios don't seem to have much of a problem.

Like pure beast said the average joe doesn't know there is any slowdown, all they see is a sharper picture.

It's Sony's fault for greenlighting that Ubisoft game that doesn't meet the standards they promised for the PS4 Pro. They fail games all the time for not meeting their TRC standards but they're looking past it now for the PS4 Pro.

This isn't just Ubisoft. Digital Foundry has seen this happening with The Last Of Us, Mantis Burn Racing, Skyrim Remastered, and Deus Ex Mankind Divided also.

 

[cmdrdredd]

It's Sony's fault for greenlighting that Ubisoft game that doesn't meet the standards they promised for the PS4 Pro. They fail games all the time for not meeting their TRC standards but they're looking past it now for the PS4 Pro.

This isn't just Ubisoft. Digital Foundry has seen this happening with The Last Of Us, Mantis Burn Racing, Skyrim Remastered, and Deus Ex Mankind Divided also.

Here is the big question. Does the game suck now that you know it loses a couple fps since the game is sharper looking?

You took sony's words literally too. They said the game can't be an inferior experience. It isn't when the game looks better. They were probably vague on purpose. I don't think for a second they meant it will always be the same frame rate. They were probably sly and means it can look better or run better pick one. I think the developers picked looking better. Imagine the backlash if a game as old as sky rim didn't run above 1080p. The internet would shut down with all the whining. I don't disagree with your point, they should give the option for rendering 1080p with a more stable frame rate.