PS4 Pro better than PC
PS4 Pro has had the gaming community giddy for months now. With all this talk of HDR and faux-4K and the like we’ve almost abandoned our current-gen love for regular PS4s and Xbox Ones as the allure of new hardware made our eyes grow large and our current consoles feel somehow less spectacular than they are.
And while there are plenty of things to be justifiably excited for beneath the hood of this tinkered console, the changes feel less like a justifiable ‘upgrade’ and more like a console industry obsessed with the lengthening shadow of PC and the toxic topics of ‘inferiority’ and ‘master races’.
We knew this day would come, after all. Years of slimline and revamped Xbox 360s and PS3s throughout the last generation was the start (remember, the Xbox 360 had three individual designs, not to mention all the memory-based iterations), sowed the seed for the state of things to come and it’s dulled our senses to the sheer ridiculousness of it all. It all started back with the PSOne and it’s been snowballing ever since.
PlayStation 4 Whoa!
So here we are – a new, iterative console within three years of the original. It seems a bit mad when you think about it, but it’s something that’s become inherent to how we view our industry. Every generation we’re bombarded with ‘informed’ analysts adamant this gen will be the last in the form of traditional consoles, a transition towards an upgraded platform a la PC proclaimed as nigh on certainty. Consoles have been ‘closed boxes’ for so long that the move to something more revolutionary is an inevitability we’ve been educated to expect.
That hyper-awareness of the PC market, where the power of your gaming experience is limited only by your bank balance (and attraction/aversion to neon backlights) has permeated every fabric of console development, especially so with the advent of VR and the near limitless potential for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. So it should come as no real surprise to see Sony attempting to close a distance with the upgradeable potential of the overclocking crew.
But why are so many of us obsessed with this bizarre need to compete when it’s both irrelevant and potentially harmful for the rest of the generation?
Unless Sony and Microsoft can somehow create modular console designs that are a.) financially viable and b.) sustainable in such a competitive market – which seems highly unlikely considering Sony has only just agreed to allow software mods on PS4 – the need to chase the coat tails of the PC is nothing more than a moot point.
Pro-bono
But it’s a problem Sony is making all the worse with its claims that PS Pro is a significant generational leap for PlayStation. But is it really?
Are three years really enough for the biggest selling console of all time to be moved one step down the food chain? Sony is adamant the regular PS4, and its near 40 million active users, aren’t being deemed irrelevant with the introduction of PS4, but with so many developers no doubt being urged to build with the extra graphical and processing oomph of PS Pro in mind it’s hard to feel like vanilla PS4 owners are going to find themselves playing an ‘inferior’ platform.
If that’s the case, and development begins to originate with PS4 Pro and ‘Pro modes’ in mind, the potential for an even greater divide could become a reality – even if it’s not division through technological performance (which it almost certainly will be in the years to come), simply creating a distinction within your own brand seems like total lunacy.
Sure, your games will look better – should you have a TV that supports HDR and 4K – but the fact of the matter is PS Pro is marketed and covered as a prologue to PS5 when in reality it’s just a beefier console designed to make PS VR feel legitimately competitive against the Vive and the Rift.
That’s not to play down what Mark Cerny and the rest of the PS Pro team at Sony has achieved with the specs inside PS Pro – the GPU power of PS Pro is double that of PS4, after all, meaning it can it’ll be to run games with far less tearing and slowdown.
Right now, that seems like a nice bonus, one that will make your games look and run more like the pre-rendered footage we’re all so used to swallowing in the big press events, but it’s going to become an issue when all that extra processing power becomes a necessity rather than an extra boon.
Infinite possibilities
Sony’s need to make PlayStation feel relevant in a competition that doesn’t need to exist will come back to bite it in the backside (and Microsoft too, should the mysterious Project Scorpio prove to be a tweaked version of Xbox One that arrives in the next year or two). Console lifecycles work best when left to ferment. Let’s not forget some truly incredible games have been built on aging technology – God of War 2, The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite to name but a few.
Reduced to potentially half the usual life cycle, consoles could well become as disposable as software as the turnover of hardware and that’s only going to alienate users who will be forced to upgrade their hardware mere years into their investment? Will this have an effect on the number of people who adopt the PS5 in its first few years? It certainly could if the new reality of iterative consoles is the one we have to accept.
And after all that, when PS4 Pro launches next month, PC will still be a ‘superior’ platform in terms of hardware performance. Which means the PlayStation VR still won’t be anywhere near catching up with the Vive and the Rift in the specs department.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter.
PS4 and Xbox One are incredibly powerful consoles, and we haven’t even come close to seeing either working at their absolute limits. It’s time for us to stop obsessing with a futile war that doesn’t need fighting and start enjoying our consoles for what they are.
Source: techradar.com
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Exactly, the 360/3 where as good as MID RANGE $800-1000 US PC's, the current gen consoles are only $200 cheaper MAX compared with PC's and you pay for online play, pay more for games and cannot upgrade them.
I bought a i7 PC in 2011, yes it was expensive (~1000 US at the time) but it is still only 20% slower then the latest 7th gen i7's CPU wise and the GPU is only about 20% off the RX480's performance.
5.5 years and can still play games better then most consoles (except maybe the PS pro) and I'll get another 3-4 years out of the CPU and ram (gpu is the only thing I will need to upgrade).
Yikes people really miss the point of console gaming. It has nothing to do with PC gaming. And you totally left the VR checkbox out for console comparisons which is coming out next week. I think Sony made it pretty clear that the PS4 Pro is a 4K TV offering. The GPU gap is 2 to 1. The price gap is small too. There is room for a price drop as well with the omission of the U-HD drive. For developers it won't be that hard to create games between both format 2K & 4K formats at 30fps. Heck even the blu-ray discs could be interchangeable between both machines. On the other hand. Scorpio wants to wave the Native 4K flag with a console that is potentially 5 times more powerful than XBox One. We know 6TFlops is still under par in the PC 4K realm. But for consoles keeping the experience relatively the same between the 3 machines (original X1) means a greater compromise in the larger GPU/CPU/MEM gap. You have a machine without HDR or UHD drive, a box with both but with no VR support or major GPU/CPU bump. And yet you have to wait a whole year for the all powerful Scorpio which is forcing developers into a next gen reset. Will it cost $500 to 600? Remember what PS3 cost to have that fancy blu-ray drive back then? Cause I'm pretty sure Microsoft's Scorpio goal is to wipe out the X1's hardware or be held back by the 5 to 1 performance gap and lack of VR. I don't want to get into who's better and all that but I believe Sony planned for a longer lifespan of it's current architecture. Lessons learned from early PS3 days. It's not a major leap forward and the price is right depending on your display choice: 2K, 4K and or VR. No one's telling us to move one way or the other. However Scorpio in my opinion must force all to upgrade unfortunately.
The writer missed the point completely, PC games outsell both Xbox and PS4.
Systems are only $200 more, are faster, don't require online subscriptions and games are cheaper.
PS5 and Xbone Scorp will be able to run Star Citizen, at lowest graphics and 720p.
Man I couldn't even finish the article. This guy doesn't get it.. The PC has ALWAYS been the performance king of gaming. Pricing has dropped so significantly in the last 3 years (Since AMD gave them cheap single chips in easy to code for X86) that you can get a new console for $400 that ACTUALLY competes in fidelity as a nearly $800 PC.
I literally can not remember a similar time in console & PC gaming where that's happened.
The PS4 PRO has a graphics card similar to an RX 480, a CURRENT GENERATION PC Graphics card!
So you can gripe all you want, the PS4 normal will still play the same games in that a AMD RX 460 can play the same games as a AMD RX 480 but with graphics turned down a bit and framerates a bit lower.
Frankly $399 for such a powerful console is a bargain..
I really don't think Sony believe PS4 Pro disproves that there is better hardware out there haha. I'm a console gamer but the benefits of PC are obvious. Of course as a console gamer I know the comforts of console gaming so I'm not saying PC is better, since that depends entirely on your circumstances and preferences, but PC has it's advantages and therefore will absolutely be clearly superior for many people, possibly even myself if I could snap my fingers and understand all things PC gaming, but having to learn things is for some people a disadvantage enough to make consoles "their" superior option, and that's the boat I'm in. PC provides superior gaming, but seems foreign to me. Visually and in-game performance wise, PC is factually superior and no one really argues that anymore, at least outside of desperate trolling.
As for the new consoles, we have just hit the point where tech is evolving faster and three years is enough time for console gamers to get a cost worthy upgrade for the same price as the previous model, so why not give the option. This isn't PC competition. The better, cheaper hardware is the determining factor, which also happens to guide PC's because PC's obviously use hardware as well. Hardware guides everything these days. Even TV's are getting better, but they aren't competing with PC's even though they are smart, nor are phones competing with PC's.
The TV industry is as much a reason for the console upgrades as improved hardware. If 4K did not come out, we probably would not have had a new PS4 yet. You could point out 4K is also part of PC gaming but 4K was made primarily for TV and gaming and again, this is just PC also being guided by the same hardware curve as all devices.
HDR isn't really such an issue. Even base PS4's do HDR now, and base XB1's may soon too. HDR doesn't require stronger hardware than what is already out for each console and is not the reason for PS4 Pro or Scorpio. It would just be dumb not to apply HDR to both.
PS I just got a 4K TV. Not sure how it stacks compared to others (don't know TV's). It's a 65 inch Sony Bravia 850D. I had a 43 inch 1080p Samsung and I thought 4K would be a little better, but I had limited expectations. I WAS SO WRONG! 4K was waayy more noticeable an upgrade than I thought. Even watching cartoons like Dragonball and the old cartoon version of The Hobbit looks so weird, in a good way, but not good at first. Remember when you first saw HD and you kinda hated it because it was too real and detached you from the immersion into the fantasy of the film, that's how I felt when I turned on 4K. Turned on Luke Cage on Netflix without even upgrading my plan to support UHD content, and the upscale alone made me think I accidentally started a documentary about the film. At first, for like 20 seconds, I was thinking, I paid to make movies look crappy, but as I got over that initial shock it became awesome. I swear there was more detail on pimples than there is detail in real life haha. Anyway just wanted to say that because most people haven't seen 4K and might not expect it to be that much better and not worth an upgrade. I will have to wait to see how games look on PS4 Pro when I get it, but now I am way more willing to believe the Pro "can" use 4K to look so much better than standard PS4.
I think you've hit the nail on the head in some regards but your comparison between the PS4 and PC costs is a bit unfair on the PC. If you're saying it uses the same GPU as a current generation PC GPU, then it;s worth considering that's a $200 mid-tier GPU, so I wouldn't expect to spend $600 on the rest of the PC. It's still cheaper up front than buying a PC though – it's just nowhere near as good a deal as you're suggesting!
I don't think the value proposition is as good as the previous generations. Like Zeppelin points out, the previous releases were all closer to the bleeding edge of gaming technology and the consoles could afford reaaally long lifespans before they started to become obsolete. However the PS4 and Xbone were so completely underwhelming that the new developments have got such a lot of room to make improvements in the value area.
The difference this time round is when the Xbox 360PS3 launched they were as good, if not better than most gaming rigs of the time. This allowed the last generation to span a ridiculous length of time, by the end of which the systems were long over due for replacement.
Games like Skyrim really look objectively bad on console, that's a 2011 game and Destiny on the X360/PS3 is the reason the games ambition was so dialed back from the original promise.
Most games are multi platform and their design ambition is always hampered by the lowest common denominator. It becomes an issue when that is a console that is 8 times less powerful than a high end gaming rig. And this is why we get terrible games like Mafia 3 which look 2006 quality.
PlayStation 4 and XB1 were anaemically underpowered AT THIER LAUNCH. So they were behind the curve before they started. This "Pro" PS4 is quite impressive when you bear in mind it's price point. But if you don't care about the one or two exclusives now is the point any sane person switches to PC as thier platform of choice. Where a £350 upgrade gets you an enormous leap in quality and not just this mild update to 4.2TF.
And the reason all this matters is we all love gaming, all of us. And we want to see the boundaries our chosen media pushed as far and as fast as possible.
Article missed the point completely.
You forget to mention that an RX480 pc can be built for $500-600 as the GPU can be found for $200 if you look around. Even better for ~200-220 US a PC gamer can get the 1060 3GB.
I only read the title and strap line and concluded it was written by an arrogant PC fanboy. The guy is clearly very worried and wants to keep consoles down.