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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.
Welcome to the final console generation as we know it
PlayStation 4 architect Mark Cerny practically whispered into his microphone as he introduced the world to Sony's newest console iteration, the PS4 Pro. His voice was at odds with the setting: He stood at the center of attention in a New York City auditorium packed with journalists and fans eager to hear about the latest and greatest Sony gaming technology. Amid frantic keyboard tapping and camera flashes, Cerny described the PS4 Pro's upgrades like a museum curator detailing a magnificent piece of art he'd just acquired. The Pro's GPU is twice as fast as the standard PS4, it can handle PSVR out of the box, it has a 1TB hard drive, boosted clock rate and it supports 4K and HDR gaming. Even some older games, including Shadow of Mordor and Infamous: First Light, will be patched to support 4K and HDR features in a move that Sony labels "forward compatibility." Cerny called the PS4 Pro transformative, while PlayStation CEO Andrew House stressed that Sony wanted to ensure anyone playing on the new, beefed-up console would still be a part of the overall PS4 community. "PS4 Pro is not intended to blur the lines between console generations," Cerny said. However, despite Sony's best intentions, the PS4 Pro smudges this generational dividing line. Modern console generations have followed a fairly rigid pattern: standard console, "slim" console, rumors of a new console. Rinse and repeat for the next four to eight years.
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.
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, 5GHz WiFi support 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.
The PS4 Slim hits shelves on September 15th for $300
Sony isn't done with the PlayStation 4. The company today revealed a thinner version of the PS4, a console that's been lurking around the rumor mill for months now. The "Slim," as it's commonly known, lands on September 15th for $300/£259. The PS4 Slim features a 500GB hard drive and 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.
Alleged PS4 Slim leak reveals incremental changes to console
Sony has confirmed its next game system, the PlayStation Neo, and will probably formally introduce it at an event on September 7th. The console maker was rumored to have built a new thinner version of their current system, the PS4 Slim, but refuses to confirm that it exists. Eurogamer seemingly got a hold of one a week ago but took down its video review after apparent legal pressure from Sony. Today, Laura K. Dale of games site Let's Play Video Games posted an unboxing report of what she alleges to be the new smaller console purchased from eBay. If true, it has a few improvements over the old model it's replacing, but we're still waiting for Sony to verify that this is indeed the final version of the system.
Video claims to show a redesigned PS4 slim controller
Earlier today Eurogamer took pictures and video of what appears to be a redesigned slim PlayStation 4, and now YouTube channel ZRZ is showing off what it says is the console's new controller. The only immediately noticeable tweak is up top, where there's either a second light bar or the DualShock 4's touchpad is allowing the light to shine through. That could be useful for syncing up with the PlayStation VR headset or just taking advantage of games that use the light indicator to give the player feedback. Lat year when we asked Sony exec Shuhei Yoshida about his favorite use for the feature, he called out Bloodborne's blood-red indicator.
The slim PS4 is looking realer every day (updated)
When photos of a purported slim PS4 redesign emerged, you could hear the skeptics' cries from a mile away: fake! Photoshopped! However, it looks like this new console is very much real. Eurogamer visited the person who bought the unreleased console from a Gumtree listing, and has posted video (below) proving that this is a real, working game system. You'll have to wait until later for more details, but what you saw before holds true: it's smaller, rounder and more utilitarian than the original.
'PS4.5' report: 4K output, will play nice with older console
The PS4.5 rumors have gotten a bit juicier. The "NEO," as it's being referred to internally, features upgraded specs (an 8-core processor running at 2.1 GHz versus the standard model's 1.6GHz, a stronger GPU and faster RAM) and 4K image output, according to documents obtained by Giant Bomb. But from the sounds of it, Sony is adamant that the NEO should not divide the 35 million-plus userbase of the original PlayStation 4. Specifically, that means the console will use the same PlayStation Network store, same user interface and any purchases made on the base system will carry over.
