The PS4 Pro made some sense. The PS4 was underpowered on launch, and 4K became pretty commonplace shortly after they launched. It still had an underpower CPU, but at least you got an upscaled HDR 1440p image for most of the time which is good enough. Even PC gamers accepted upscaling to 4K once they gave it a fancy name and told them it was exclusive.

But here, you've already got a choice of pretty RT mode and 60 fps mode, and if you really wanted both of those at the same time, then you could lash out a big pile of money for a PC.

It's 700 notes for half a generation of slightly prettier gaming. It's aimed at the "turn everything to ultra and have a fit when it drops below 60fps" PC gaming demographic, who have no need for this.

[–] PunchingWood@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'm afraid that if they keep making 'superior' versions of the same generation of consoles that we'll end up with 'semi-exclusives' anyway. Simply because those will run a lot better on the more expensive hardware, and what I'm most afraid of is that a lot of developers will get lazy in optimisation, because why the hell would they bother if they can just make it run good enough on the 'high-end' platform so to speak.

And bet you that Sony will encourage developers on this too, because they're gonna want to have reasons to sell the Pro, especially if there are no exclusive titles to promote it with.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 points 2 months ago

They were already lazy because the hardware was powerful enough to hide a lot of sins.

FF7 Rebirth for example. It looks much better on the Pro, but frankly, it should have looked much better on the base console. And it came out well before the Pro was announced.

But at the same time, the majority of PC gamers are happily still playing at 1080p. Resolution was always overrated and an expensive thing to chase.

The only semi-exclusive from last gen was Cyberpunk, and I can't really see things being much different. If a game engine was capable of running at 60 if you reduce the graphics, they'll still offer that. If it wasn't, then the Pro won't be able to run it faster either. It's pretty much the exact same CPU under both.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 points 2 months ago

That may be the way consoles go.

We aren't seeing the kinds of innovation happening in hardware that justifies dropping backward compatibility and the AAA gaming market hasn't released games in the quantity they did before.

So Sony and Microsoft can update the hardware in a way to maintain backwards comparability and game companies have the option of developing to the current generation only, both generations with different graphics, or the older generation.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't think most PC gamers are running 4k. With all the price shenanigans in the GPU market over the last 5 years, actually achieving 4k has been an expensive journey for anyone doing it. Especially when games play just fine at half or a quarter of that.

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They're not. Steam survey has 4K monitors at under 4%. Well over half are at 1080p and below. There's exactly 1 GPU in the top 10 above the nVidia x060 series.

The way things get reviewed, you'd think 4K was a minimum. I suspect the majority of high end cards out there aren't even used for gaming.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

After I posted I was reminded that it's still common in FPS games to brick the graphics so there's less hiding spots. But also my graphics card is like 7 years old and runs everything I've come across except Star Citizen. (Which is its own whole level of fuckery)