The PlayStation 4 Pro was officially unveiled earlier this week and I’ve already pre-ordered mine. You may be wondering why I would invest in a more powerful PlayStation 4 when I have a PC that’s a new video card away from being awesome. The answer is simple: it’s currently cheaper for my brother and I to share games in the PlayStation 4 ecosystem.
Steam has game sharing but it doesn’t allow for him and I to play multiplayer games with a single copy. Then there are titles like Overwatch that costs $79.99 CAD on PlayStation Network but ends being cheaper compared to two $39.99 USD copies of Overwatch on Battle.net which ends up being $104 CAD for the both of us.
The cost of PlayStation Plus sucks and I would rather not pay to access multiplayer but the Instant Game Collection offers have been decent. I’m not opposed to indie games so the likes of Journey, Tricky Towers or Rebel Galaxy being offered is welcomed.
What about the hardware being offered though?
4K – I don’t have a 4K TV. I don’t want to pick up another LCD so I’m waiting for a quality 55″ OLED screen for about $2500 CAD. It may not be powerful enough to push native 4K but hearing that the reconstruction/scaling produces impressive results is pleasantly surprising.
HDR – I’ve heard about HDR and its benefits for quite some time. It’s the true game changer — more so than 4K resolution itself. I haven’t seen the difference in person but I don’t doubt that people’s claims.
1080p Improvements – Even if Sony didn’t highlight the 1080p gaming improvements, I would have picked a PS4 Pro because of the improved hardware. Faster hardware running existing games should yield some improvements. Games that struggle to reach their performance targets may reach those targets with more consistency. Games that have uncapped framerates will given more resources to work with. We’ve seen the New Nintendo 3DS reap the benefits of improved hardware and the same with the Xbox One S and its marginal GPU overclock. But Sony is asking developers to go the extra mile with new releases and include a Pro specific improvements in visual fidelity. Some older titles will see PS4 Pro patches that will bring visual fidelity improvements.
VR – More powerful hardware will undoubtedly help PlayStation VR but since I have little to no interest in VR at the moment, I don’t really care how much of an improvement it brings.
The $499.99 CAD price may be $100 more than what our American counterparts are paying but it could have been worse. For whatever reason, it is $50 CAD cheaper than the PlayStation VR which was a $399.99 USD product that was inexplicably converted to $549.99 CAD.
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I’ve reached my season 2 goal of reaching Diamond level in Overwatch. I should put Deus Ex: Mankind Divided down and wait for the upcoming PlayStation 4 Pro improvements but I’m enjoying it too much to do so.
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