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‘PlayStation 4 Pro’ Officially Unveiled, Leaves More Questions Than Answers

By Joseph Bradford
Published on: 09:46 PST, Sep 7, 2016

In Times Square this afternoon, Sony announced the new PlayStation Pro, formerly titled the NEO. The console, which looks like just a taller version of the now officially confirmed PlayStation 4 Slim, will officially launch this November at a price of $399. While this is certainly much lower than some expected from a console that was touted as offering 4K support, there still seems to be some questions as to what this console truly does better than the current options on the market.

The PlayStation 4 Pro isn’t “intended to blur lines between console generations,” Mark Cerny said while debuting the PS4 Pro onstage. Instead, the “vision is to take the experience to extraordinary new levels.” However, what PlayStation has failed to do is truly and adequately showcase why the PS4 Pro is a quality step up for PlayStation fans. This biggest elephant in the room has been that nothing showcased on screen was any different than what a current PC couldn’t already do, if not better.

That’s the largest drawback. While the PlayStation 4 Pro does support 4K displays, it doesn’t render in native 4K, which is a crucial difference. Cerny mentioned onstage that temporal and spatial anti-aliasing algorithms would be used to achieve the ultra HD resolution, however, what he’s referring to is upscaling, something the consoles technically already do to achieve 1080p on some titles. And while the PlayStation 4 Pro will support 4K apps and the obviously upscale to games, interestingly enough, it doesn’t support 4K mediums such as Blu-rays. It’s important to note that the Xbox One S, Sony’s direct competitor, does this already. Microsoft wasted no time in pointing out that fact.

The biggest issue, however, is the fidelity and performance of the games. The official specs, revealed via a press release and not the actual presentation, match closely with the leaked specs in the WCCF Tech piece a few months back. Those showed a 4.2 TeraFLOP target (for reference, the Scorpio teased by Microsoft at E3 2016 sports over 6 TeraFLOPS). 4.2 TFLOPS is simply not enough power to support ultra-HD resolution gaming. For reference, the Nvidia GTX 980, a card from a few years ago on PC, has 4.6 TFLOPS, and it cannot handle 4K gaming at manageable framerates for most titles. Sony is selling an ultra resolution that its own box can’t even perform. That’s a gross misnomer that Sony is delivering.

Additionally, nothing that was shown off today is anything new in terms of the gaming industry. PCs can do everything the PlayStation 4 Pro can, if not better. Many will point to cost and form factor, and those are issues. However, with PC hardware being cheaper than ever thanks to Polaris by AMD and Pascal by Nvidia, you no longer need to spend astronomical amounts of money for quality performance. The Rx 480, a $200-ish GPU, can handle native 4K resolution on games and is a leader in terms of DirectX 12 performance.

So who is Sony really targeting with the PlayStation 4 Pro? Is it more powerful than the current iteration? Sure, but by how much? What will the actual performance trade-off be with the Pro versus the new Slim? Will it make the current games not only look better but run better? As someone who prioritizes having a high framerate, will games such as Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End finally be closer to the E3 2014 demo Naughty Dog showed off? Why should someone spend money on the console? Sony failed to answer that, no matter how soothing Mark Cerny’s voice.

This is eerily similar to the situation we saw when the Wii U was announced. There wasn’t a tangible reason as to why a consumer should move over, and that is seemingly what we are experiencing with the PlayStation 4 Pro. Will some users grab the new console based on half-promises of better-looking games? Sure, but Sony promised better-looking titles before with the PlayStation 4, and we’ve yet to see that materialize for the most part.

Are you looking at the new PlayStation Pro? Sound off with your thoughts in the comments below.

[Image via Peter Kotoff / Shutterstock.com]

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