Today is the day that Sony finally reveals the future of their console systems. At their conference in New York, they announced the newest consoles coming our way. The PS4 Slim that was almost entirely leaked back in August was the first up. But that wasn’t all that Sony had to offer. The majority of their show became focused on the new technology coming to the “PS4.5”, revealing the console and it’s official name.
The PS4 Slim $299, launching on September 15th. It’ll be considered the new “standard” PS4 model from here on out. But then the conference went into detail about their other project. With the PS4 Pro, Andrew House is stressing a focus on unity as much as possible, with downloads and content being the same between both systems.
The PS4 Pro is the name of the new “Neo” console, that was also titled “PS4.5” up to this point. Sitting alongside the standard PS4, the Pro will have a higher focus on 4K high resolution and HDR content. When it comes to the pure guts of the system, there’s an upgraded gpu and a higher clock rate, packed with a 1 TB hard drive to help give this upgraded technology some room to breathe. Game developers are still trying to figure out how to best implement HDR technology in their games, and Sony doesn’t expect everyone to pick up on it immediately. The focus of HDR is on coloration and light levels, attempting to portray a photo-realistic image back to the viewer. There’s a minimal hardware usage from this as well, and it’s best taken advantage by connecting a PS4 Pro to a HDR capable television. But it’s not necessary to have HDR to get an extra boost, as there’s upgrades to texture resolution and rendering quality beyond that. Showing off some footage of the Pro rendering in action, we got to see clips from Spider-man, For Honor, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Watch Dogs 2, and others. But many older games in the PS4 library are getting a “forward compatibility” patch, to fully take advantage of the new console.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered will support PS4 Pro on Day 1. Mass Effect: Andromeda will also take advantage of the new hardware. They actually showed off gameplay from the new Mass Effect game, which was unexpected. Movie streaming is another feature of PS4 Pro, with a 4K and HDR Netflix deal struck between Sony and themselves. YouTube will have a similar content offering. This technology upgrade is also instrumental for Playstation VR performance optimization.
The PS4 Pro comes out on November 10th for $399.
