PS4pro: Digital Foundry Hands On (Looking Good)

[mutantsushi]

Intrinsic said:

Mafioso said:
I'm sure they'll fix it for launch, but i'm surprised Sony showed Pro running Horizon dropping frames into the 20's like this.

When you put it that some will think it was dropping from 60-20fps when in truth it was more like from 30-29/28fps..... But the game is also 5 months away and there is really nothing you can do about it not being fully optimized. 

I dont see anything wrong with "the way he put it".  
Anybody imagining 60fps Horizon should get professional help, and his comment does nothing to delude such people more than they are.
Even with less than perfect optimization, I'd have expected Sony to release less demanding scenes that wouldn't trigger frame drops.

Intrinsic said:

binary solo said:

But do they need to double frame rate? What if games on PS4 are able to hit 45 or 50fps reasonably reliably? 30fps is the set point because you either go 30 or 60. But just because you set the game at 30 doesn't mean that's the maximum it can achieve.

You are right. In truth there are tons of ways devs can hit 60fps if they really wanted to put in yhe extra work to do it. One popular method is by running physics at 30fps then redrawig the scene at 60fps.

Basically, a game that is already internally running at around 45-50fps but locked down to 30fps for smoothness can easily be pushed to run at 60fps with a 30% boost in CPU power. 

But as he said there is another problem. The devs probably wouldn't use that extra PC power to push for a 60fps refresh rate. They are more likely to throw in more objects on the screen, more light sources or reflections, more gloss generally and stuff.... cUse eye candy (unfortunately) markets itself.

Devs would tend to avoid producing game that natively outputs 45-50fps,
because the increased FPS is entirely wasted, and that power used for the (wasted) FPS could be better put to use for graphics, etc.
(and that isn't even arguable, unlike 60fps VS graphics, if it is only 45fps which can't be output on TVs, there is literally no benefit)
Given that, there will be few or none PS4 games which can be boosted to 60 fps by PS4 Pro.
Any games  already achieving 60 fps (on at least semi-consistent basis) would be able to lock that in and have better graphics with Pro.a

It does seem like variable resolution frame buffer, which shrinks instead of FPS dropping, seems getting more common esp. on Xbone,
and honestly that is the most effective means for smooth experience with least impact on play.
Not sure how well that can be used with PS4 Pro's checkerboarding, albeit all it's games  are upgraded PS4 games, so probably OK.