PS4 Pro vs PS4 Graphical Comparison Thread

Pro makes quite a different to a number of PSVR titles in terms of how sharp the visuals are. In particular VR Wolrds, Wayward Sky and the Playroom VR have all been given quite a boost! :yes:
From what I've tried, the VR Worlds Ocean Descent was definitely better looking on Pro, also London Heists car chase/shooting part was much clearer on further distances.
Playroom VR too was much clearer overall. The Pro's clearly rendering higher resolution, distant objects are much better aliased and the boost in resolution is very noticeable in these two titles.
I think the Batman Arkham VR looked a bit better too.
 
Last edited:
It would, but horror games and the games like Doom usually feature a lot of dark areas and places that have few light sources, that helps mask aliasing problems in large sections of the map, though areas that are lit have their aliasing pronounced due to the specular element indeed. Still comparing Doom (no AA) to a game like Dying Light or AC4 (no AA also) usually reveals way more jaggies in the case of those sunny and properly lit scenes, especially where a lot of geometries (buildings, poles, wires, fences) are rendered over near and far distances.

Yes, there is something true about it. But in comparison to specular aliasing, those jaggies can be reduced more effective with higher resolutions. This does not need the best TAA to cover it. Even a mediocre TAA helps here already much in FullHD.
DOOM was not the best example of standard dark games. However, PBR has increased the problem with specular aliasing. There are more potential spots which can flicker strikingly. While this was as far as I can remember not the case at the time of Half Life 2.

In the last years I had much less problems with the aliasing you mentioned.
 
In the last years I had much less problems with the aliasing you mentioned.
Yeah, I can say the same, the advent of post process AA really changed something, gone are the days where we have to sit helplessly staring at games released with no AA support whatsoever because their engines are not compatible with MSAA! Now we have post process readily available since launch, or forcible through driver, we have effective temporal solutions and if all fails downsampling can be activated in game or through driver as well. Jaggies are not a hard problem as they were once, what I take as a problem though is the non perfect effectiveness of multiple solutions to completely irradiate jaggies, in some games I strove for that perfect CGI look, no aliasing and a pinch of smoothed out frames, the last part was successful, the first part, still not so much even by combining multiple powerful solutions.
 
The difference in framerate and res doesnt show much in that video. I guess its the youtube's compression?
 
"EA and DICE are committed to supporting HDR on PS4 Pro. Although we do not have any information to share at the moment please stay tuned to the official Battlefield channels as we will share details once we are ready to share them."

https://twitter.com/Battlefield/status/796858908987899904?ref_src=twsrc^tfw



_______


I hope the developers of the games will fix the issue. A Pro should always run better. Unfortunately, some games run at a lower frame rate.

Especially from Naughty Dog I would have expected better.
 
Last edited:
This is the first batch of Pro updates. I'm sure the developers will get better at Pro support. I also hope they will include more modes for the players to choose.
 
Hope that BF1 HDR patch comes sooner than later, at the moment using Extended Dynamic Range function on the tv seems to work pretty well but it;s not real HDR. A game like BF1 with so many explosions would surely benefit a lot from the HDR.
 
"EA and DICE are committed to supporting HDR on PS4 Pro. Although we do not have any information to share at the moment please stay tuned to the official Battlefield channels as we will share details once we are ready to share them."

https://twitter.com/Battlefield/status/796858908987899904?ref_src=twsrc^tfw



_______


I hope the developers of the games will fix the issue. A Pro should always run better. Unfortunately, some games run at a lower frame rate.

Especially from Naughty Dog I would have expected better.
Yes, 3 games including 2 old remastered games that nobody cares about and that have occasional and small framerate drops on the Pro. No big deal. It could have being much worse than that. Like Battlefield 4 disastrous launch. or the XB1 resolution gate for the first COD on XB1...

On the other hand all the big and new games are working impressively well on Pro: Fifa17, BF1, the 2 COD games, Titanfall 2, soon FF15. It's a success and a real testimony of an accomplished mission for Sony and particularly Cerny.
 
Yes, 3 games including 2 old remastered games that nobody cares about and that have occasional and small framerate drops on the Pro. No big deal. It could have being much worse than that. Like Battlefield 4 disastrous launch. or the XB1 resolution gate for the first COD on XB1...

On the other hand all the big and new games are working impressively well on Pro: Fifa17, BF1, the 2 COD games, Titanfall 2, soon FF15. It's a success and a real testimony of an accomplished mission for Sony and particularly Cerny.
For the price of the Ps4 Pro it defenitly delivers a jump in IQ compared to the base Ps4. I just wish that games that offer a 60fps mode would prioritize the frame rate over resolution. Hitting something like 1440p and locked 60 fps would be the ideal sweet spot.
 
For the price of the Ps4 Pro it defenitly delivers a jump in IQ compared to the base Ps4. I just wish that games that offer a 60fps mode would prioritize the frame rate over resolution. Hitting something like 1440p and locked 60 fps would be the ideal sweet spot.
But this year they already do that actually thanks to their aggressive dynamic res. Most modes of Titanfall 2 and BF1 run at a solid 60fps with an average resolution of 1440p or more using checkerboard rendering for BF1 (checkerboard 1800p being the max apparently).

Only the conquest modes of BF1 do have some notable drops but an average of 57fps seen on conquest maps on Pro is quite a significant improvement I'd say compared to 49fps / 51fps on PS4/XB1. And in this mode the drops are probably due to CPU bottleneck so it would be useless to further lower the resolution here: I don't think they prioritize res over fps in this case.
 
Checked out UC4 on the Pro finally, to my surprise despite not running checkerboard, the 1440p native res still looked fantastic and textures appeared sharper as a result. The HDR however was mindblowing in some levels and combined with the higher res it really stood out from all the other Pro games.
4k downscaled to 1080p
13nsb7.png

https://abload.de/img/2wcs1i.png
https://abload.de/img/33fsan.png
 
Like Naughty Dog where Pro version runs slower at some places than on original PS4, thus breaking Sony's guidelines ;-) :D

As Globalisateur notes, this seems to be something affecting older games that may not be using engines built to accommodate Pro codepaths. What will be interesting is to see what Sony does about this.

I tried Pro Remote Play on our iMac this morning. Our Pro is connected by ethernet to the router and the iMac is couple of rooms away and connected wirelessly using 801.11ac at 5Ghz. The experience was.... not bad, all things considered. Then I realised the streaming was running at the default 540p. A quick visit to preferences and changing the streaming settings to 1080p/high frame rate and.... wow.

What sorcery is this, Sony!?!?! I can post screen shots but unfortuntaely the macOS screen capture utility adds some aggressive jpeg compression.
 
Just press command+shift+3 and check your desktop for a png screenshot :)
Yeah, mine throws out JPG. I changed it from PNG to JPG some time back when I needed to capture a few hundred images in JPG and never changed it back.

When I get 5 mins I'll google the system setting and change it back and post screen shots of a 1080p window and full (1440p) screen as it appears in full screen. I'll do it today.

Edit: I can't get a 1080p window because I've re-sized it and it now remembers the resizing - d'oh! Here is the 3.7mb PNG of a frame in 2560x1440 as it appears in 1080p high frame rate streaming mode. It looks slick in motion. In a few mins of play the bandwidth ranges from 300 kilobytes/sec to 2.5 megabytes/sec for the stream.

Edit2: Actual 1440p image. D'oh.

2016-11-13%20R%26C%20on%20PS4%20Pro%20Remote%20Play%20%281080p%29.png
 
Last edited by a moderator:
DOOM was not the best example of standard dark games. However, PBR has increased the problem with specular aliasing. There are more potential spots which can flicker strikingly. While this was as far as I can remember not the case at the time of Half Life 2.

In the last years I had much less problems with the aliasing you mentioned.
Proper HDR ranges (10k+ lux white outdoor walls hit by direct sunlight, 0.1 lux dark indoors) and physically plausible GGX specular result in very high brightness ranges. Old LDR games were muted in comparison. Didn't even need eye adaptation.

This video is a good example how bad GGX specular looks on industrial surfaces (DOOM like) when there's no specular antialiasing applied:

(FF over the marketing bullshit in the beginning)

Modern PBR rendering needs either temporal AA or some specific specular AA solution (Toksvig mapping, LEAN mapping, etc). MSAA does not adequatly remove specular aliasing.
 
Modern PBR rendering needs either temporal AA or some specific specular AA solution (Toksvig mapping, LEAN mapping, etc). MSAA does not adequatly remove specular aliasing.
But does specular aliasing cause so much bright circles on these industrial surfaces? it looks like small suns flickering on there! I had no idea this is the result of no AA, always thought it's deliberate!
 
Back
Top