Yesterday, after much speculation, Sony finally unveiled the PlayStation 4 Pro, a beefed-up version of the PS4 that will bring 4K resolution, high dynamic range (HDR) visuals and better framerates to console gaming. Releasing the Pro before the new Xbox gives Sony an edge over its rival for the holiday season. That console costs $299 over the $399 for the PS4 Pro.
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PlayStation 4 Pro owners won’t be the only ones getting in on the graphical upgrades, though.
The lower-end PS4 model, which goes on sale from September 15, is about 30 percent smaller and 16 percent lighter than the current PS4. The PlayStation Meeting event gave gamers the full reveal of their upcoming console lineup that being the newer PlayStation 4 standard edition with a slimmer chassis along with their latest updated console within the same generation, the PlayStation 4 Pro. Greenberg tweeted that the Sony console has no 4K Blu-Ray functionality, which confused the PS4 users. The new system can output in 4K resolution, while the PS4 and PS4 Slim cannot.
Right now Sony has a bigger problem to solve with regards to selling the PS4 Pro to consumers. In fact, that seems very unlikely. From the looks of it, this new console will be the most powerful addition to the PS4 family to date. You won’t see any new modes or special features in games on the PS4 Pro, just graphical improvements.
This announcement was quite surprising, and if you own an Xbox One you may wonder if Microsoft could also enable HDR on your console via a future update.
For the 4K HDR patch for existing titles, will it cost money?
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As with the 4K TV scenario, Blow and his team are now exploring how they can improve the visual quality further by using things like “increased streaming distance for high-resolution meshes, or decreasing the noticeability of the fade-in between faraway LODs and high-res close-up meshes”.
