Heading into Wednesday’s Sony PlayStation Meeting, the Digital Crack team was high on speculation. We knew about the PS4 Slim, which was leaked two weeks prior to its actual reveal. But we were as clueless about the console codenamed “PS4 Neo” as anyone not working for Sony. The rumors and guesses had us thinking up crazy shit.
“I read it’s going to be called PS4 Forever and be modular.”
“It has to have a 4K Blu-Ray player, right? I mean, they invented the damn thing!”
“I heard it’s gonna cure acne.”
(Note: one of those quotes was not really said.)
Leading up to the 3 PM EST start of the livestream, the rumors and speculation still flied between us. One hour later, I was too bored to even care.
Yes, they formally announced the PS4 Slim at the PlayStation Meeting. The thinner variant, which will retail for $299 and be released on September 15th, is confusing. Yes, the price is attractive for people who don’t have a PS4 already and are on a budget. But the original PS4 is still in stock now, and I’m sure it’ll see a price drop that puts it below the PS4 Slim. Some gamers will avoid the Slim because of missing features, like no optical port. But in the end, why would anyone want a PS4 Slim when it showed up with a new big brother than blows it out of the water?
The big brother, of course, is the Neo, now officially known as the PlayStation 4 Pro. This is the new, stronger console that Sony says is for hardcore gamers. And it is a definite bump in hardware. The specs weren’t mentioned during the PlayStation Meeting, however. All that was shown and mentioned was how pretty and shiny the graphics were gonna be. Video after video was shown, highlighting how absolutely shiny upcoming titles like Horizon Zero Dawn and Mass Effect Andromeda look on the PS4 Pro.
Yes, the graphical improvements that the PS4 Pro will bring are interesting. But Sony spent an inordinate amount of time just showing off pretty gameplay videos of upcoming games. Those are videos which, by the way, did not look so pretty during a livestream. What we wanted was the details: price and specs.
The price was announced at the end of the PlayStation Meeting, where they unveiled the console’s look. It will retail for $399 USD, which is a good thing. I thought it would cost at least $50 more. It also has a release date of November 10th, just in time for the holidays. I also hoped it would be more powerful.
The specs were released well after, and they concern me personally. The CPU/GPU is still based on an 8-core AMD Jaguar CPU, but now it’s paired with a GPU core based on AMD’s Polaris core, the very core that power’s AMD’s Radeon RX 480. It’s paired with 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM. This CPU/GPU hybrid will push 4.2 TFLOPS, which is a dramatic improvement from the original PS4’s 1.84 TFLOPS. These specs were leaked well in advance of the Meeting, so they’re no surprise. But I’m still disappointed.
First, the elephant in the room. All throughout the Meeting, Sony’s executives were bandying about 4K as a major selling point. The videos of upcoming games showed of 4K visuals. The whole point of the PS4 Pro, you would think, is that is can game at 4K. If not, what’s the point?
Here’s where I drop the bad news: the PS4 Pro can play at 4K…but not natively.
AMD’s Polaris GPU is a pretty powerful chip…if you like gaming at 1080p. And I have absolutely no problem with 1080p. But it CANNOT do true native 4K properly except in a very rare set of circumstances. It simply does not have the horsepower to do so. The PS4 Pro will skirt this by offering UPSCALED 4K. The games will play at either 1080p or 1440p – so-called 2K – and simply be scaled up to account for 4K televisions. That still may be good enough to make games look pretty, especially when you add HDR into the mix. But it’s not true 4K.
It’s like if you bout an HDTV and found out it could only do 1080i. Yea, it’s still pretty, but it’s a technological trick.
The lack of a 4K Blu-Ray drive – also announced after the Meeting – also sours me on the PS4 Pro. This is a major omission on their part. No, I don’t need one, because I don’t even have a 4K TV yet. But plenty of people do, including Digital Crack’s own Punisher, and he was looking to upgrade to the PS4 Pro IF it had that one feature.
Sony’s PlayStation Meeting, in my opinion, spent a lot more time marketing its games than it did the most important thing: the PS4 Pro. There was no excitement at all. It’s almost like they wanted to gloss over it by showing a lot of graphical pizazz and ignore the fact that it’s at a disadvantage. Microsoft’s upcoming uber-console, codenamed Scorpio, is already specced to be more powerful than the PS4 Pro. I’m sure the Scorpio will also be more expensive, but this is a hardcore console. Hardcore gamers are expected to pay more for the power. Scorpio looks to have the power; the PS4 Pro doesn’t.
Also, DAMN the PS4 Pro is big! After slimming the original PS4 down to the svelte PS4 Slim, they sure bulked up the PS4 Pro.
