Gaming News - Page 1522

Sony is going to make it very easy to know which games are enhanced for the new PlayStation 4 Pro, with the company using a "PS4 Pro Enhanced" sticker or icon on the PS4 packaging.

Sony says: "You can check PlayStation Store for games that take advantage of PS4 Pro specific features, or look for the PS4 Pro Enhanced icon on software packaging. PS4 Pro Enhanced features vary by game. Select titles may have enhanced visuals, frame rate, HDR 10 support, or increases in resolution".

Some of the new games that are enhanced for the new PS4 Pro include Battlefield 1, Horizon Zero Dawn, Elder Scrolls Online, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Watch Dogs 2, Mass Effect Andromeda, and more.

There will be a few games launching for the PlayStation 4 Pro that will be running in their native 4K resolution, while some other games like Horizon Zero Dawn that will get close to, but not quite 4K.

Elder Scrolls Online will be running on the PS4 Pro at its native 4K resolution, with Bethesda teasing there will be "increased graphical fidelity" on the PS4 Pro for ESO.

Bethesda added: "When the PlayStation 4 Pro launches on 10th November 2016, The Elder Scrolls Online will be immediately playable in native 4K resolution, whether purchased new, or with existing game discs. Since the game was originally designed for a wide range of PC specifications, ZeniMax Online Studios was able to scale up the presentation alongside the scaled up power of the PlayStation 4 Pro. For players, this means that if you play The Elder Scrolls Online on the PlayStation 4 Pro with a 1080p HD television, you will experience increased graphical fidelity; if a player uses a 4K monitor, the game will automatically run in 4K".

Sony's PS4 Pro is all about 4K...except when it comes to 4K Blu-rays. That's right, the PS4 Pro doesn't play 4K UHD Blu-rays. Why would Sony make such an obvious omission especially when its competitor's $299 console supports it? So it could push gamers to sign up for its digital 4K movie streaming service called ULTRA.

In its own words, here's why Sony cut out the 4K UHD Blu-ray player from the PS4 Pro: "Our feeling is that while physical media continues to be a big part of the games business, we see a trend on video towards streaming. Certainly with our user base, it's the second biggest use case for people's time on the system so we place more emphasis on that area," Sony Interactive Entertainment President Andrew House told The Guardian.

In actuality, there's a few reasons Sony shaved of 4K UHD Blu-ray support from its new PlayStation 4 Pro. The most obvious reason you'd think is because of the cost of the Blu-ray player itself, but the reality is that the PS4 Pro already has the requisite hardware for 4K UHD video playback, which is the most expensive part.

There's been lots of confusion surrounding Sony's new 4K-ready PS4 Pro console, and in an attempt to clear things up, the Japanese console-maker has issued a massive console FAQ which you can find in its entirety below.

The new $399 PlayStation 4 Pro is definitely a huge improvement over the original PS4, offering an AMD Polaris-based GPU with double the power at 4.20 TFLOPs, an overclocked CPU, higher RAM bandwidth, and all kinds of embedded scaling tech. While the PS4 Pro won't have exclusive games and play all old PS4 games, the selling point is that the console will render games in up to 4K 30FPS on 4K TVs and up to native 1080p 60FPS on HDTVs, while delivering considerable performance upgrades.

On PS4 Pro, games will look and play better than they ever did on original PS4 consoles, and you won't need a 4K TV to benefit from the console.

As promised yesterday, DirectX 12 support has arrived for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Sadly, it's in beta form only, so results are likely to not be as good as you'd hope off the bat.

To try DX12, right click on the game in Steam, navigate to Properties > Beta, then select dx12_preview and close the window. Be sure to grab the new AMD drivers and the latest NVIDIA drivers for best results.

Reports so far indicate moderate improvement or no improvement in FPS and frametimes for AMD users and worse performance for NVIDIA users. In the latter case, one hopes for an upcoming driver to better the situation.

Sony has confirmed that it's new $399 PlayStation 4 Pro console leverages AMD's new Polaris GPU architecture--and even reaches beyond Polaris--to enable 4K gaming, higher FPS, and more.

While we still don't know exact specifics on the PlayStation 4 Pro's GPU hardware, we do know it's based on AMD's Polaris tech and rocks 4.20 TeraFLOPs of compute power, sitting just below the Radeon RX 470. This puts the PS4 Pro's GPU at more than double the PS4's original 1.84 TFLOPs GPU that equated closely to a Radeon HD 7850 in specs. We also have reason to believe that the PS4 Pro's APU is based on the efficient 16nm FinFET node.

"Our goal with the PS4 Pro is to deliver high-fidelity graphical experiences. With that in mind, we've more than doubled the power of the GPU and adopted many new features from the AMD Polaris architecture as well as several even beyond it," PS4 Pro designer Mark Cerny said at the PlayStation Meeting event.

UPDATE: In addition to the 14 games listed here, the following games will also feature upgraded performance on Sony's PS4 Pro: Titanfall 2, The Last of Us Remastered, Paragon, Shadow of Mordor, Infamous Last Light, Uncharted 4 and Elder Scrolls Online. More games will be added as well.

There is a list of games that will have built-in support for the upgraded PlayStation 4 Pro console, with some of the biggest new games of the year making the list. These games include Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Watch Dogs 2, and more.

The games that have PS4 Pro support will use the additional horsepower and 4K output for better looking games that will also run better on the PS4 Pro, so we should expect most of these games to [hopefully] run at 60FPS on 1080p HDTVs. Sadly, it's up to devs how these upgrades are applied, so not every game will run at native 1080p 60FPS on PS4 Pro. Older games will need to be updated with Forward Compatibility updates to leverage the PS4 Pro's new hardware, and Mark Cerny affirms that more older PS4 games will be supported in the future:

Sony announced its new $399 PS4 Pro (codenamed "Neo") console yesterday, but the lack of a clear upgrade path has left many gamers scratching their heads. Will the PS4 Pro play all old PS4 games better than original PS4s or not? The answer is: maybe, if the devs allow it.

Yesterday we reported that developers hold the ultimately say in how their PS4 games are upgraded on the new PS4 Pro. Old PS4 games must be patched with "Forward Compatibility" upgrades in order to play better on Sony's new PlayStation Pro hardware, but devs get to choose what performance enhancements to apply to their games. This means that all older PS4 games (and possibly newer ones) that are updated with Forward Compatibility won't hit native 1080p 60FPS by default: devs can choose frame rates, upscaling visuals, and a number of different upgrades for their titles.

"Depending on how the developer chooses to use the increased processing power, games with PS4 Pro support are able to render higher or more consistent framerates, increased environmental and character model detail, improved overall visual quality, and other related visual enhancements," Sony said in a recent PS4 Pro FAQ.

Even with the beefier hardware inside of the new and improved PlayStation 4 Pro, Mass Effect: Andromeda will still only be running at 30FPS, the same framerate the current PS4 will be capable of.

Fabrice Condominas is a producer on Mass Effect: Andromeda, and during an interview with GameSpot where he shared the news. The PS4 Pro might be faster than the PS4, but limiting it to 30FPS means that Mass Effect: Andromeda will look much better on the PS4 Pro compared to the PS4 thanks to being upscaled to 4K.

GameSpot did note that the version of Mass Effect: Andromeda they saw was a pre-alpha build, and that optimization made on the game between now and its release could "lead to better performance".

Sony is still keeping some of the more detailed technical specifications on its new PS4 Pro under wraps, but during a roundtable interview session with some of the development team on Horizon Zero Dawn, there were questions asked about the "nitty gritty" of the PS4 Pro and its performance.

Guerrilla Games' managing director Herman Hulst along with art director Jan-Bart Van Beek gave some details, but PS4 lead system architect Mark Cerny will provide a more detailed response soon. GameSpot reports that a PlayStation representative talked about Cerny's comments in the roundtable, saying that Sony will "have more technical details in the near future".

The question asked was if Horizon Zero Dawn's assets are rendered in 4K for the PS4 Pro version of the game, with Van Beek saying that it's not quite 4K, adding that it's "so close" that you might not be able to tell. He said: "It's not native 4K. It is perceptively so close that you wouldn't be able to see the difference with normal human eyes".