Free from the shackles of Xbox One, Rise of the Tomb Raider is doing incredible things with PS4 Pro
"You can go for a high frame rate – so if you’re going at 1080p on a PS4 Pro you can run with an unlocked frame rate. So instead of being just at 30 you can run north of 45 frames or better. It’s one of those things that, when you start playing it, it’s great for those speed runners and those hardcore gamers who are just like ‘I want to get through this as quick as I can, I want seamless controls’.
Then you’re like… this is a beautiful area, I want to take a closer look, you can slide over a notch and now we have enhanced visuals. That’s actually 1080p locked at 30 frames but we throw everything in that we can – lighting, multi-pass rendering, texture shading, reflections, density of pixels, density of particle effects… everything we can turn on. It’s just this beautiful-looking experience at a locked 1080p, 30 frames.
Then you go to 4K. Suddenly there’s things in the world that with this ratchet up in crispness and clarity that you just couldn’t see before. Something on the horizon that used to be a blob of kind of grey shadow on the hillside is now a very crisp outline of a ruin with a cross on top of it. It has some sunlight poking through a hole and trees way off in the distance, and you honestly couldn’t have seen that before, it would’ve just faded off and dropped to a low resolution – but now you can see it. That does have this ratcheting effect on the immersion and on the ‘oh my god, I’m actually there’ experience."
Personal Comment: I'm not a Tomb Raider fan, but I would love to see this sort of application to all PS4 games moving forward being a 1080p HDTV owner.
