PlayStation 4 Pro is not a real 4K console

PlayStation 4 Pro made its big debut yesterday, and Sony is selling it as a 4K gaming box. But most of the games the company showed were not rendering a native 4K image. Instead, you were probably seeing something closer to 1440p or 1800p. That’s quite a lot less detail than 2160p — although, for the Sony’s new supersystem, it doesn’t matter.

The PS4 Pro does not have the horsepower to render native 4K. Developers are already admitting that. Guerrilla Games confirmed that it isn’t rendering Horizon: Zero Dawn, its open-world sci-fi adventure, at the 3,840 x 2160 resolution that is standard for 4K. Sony itself plainly stated yesterday during its event in Manhattan that it didn’t want to make a machine that could fill all 8 million pixels of a 4K television set.

“Brute-force rendering techniques can of course be used to support [4K] displays,” PlayStation technical chief Mark Cerny said during the PlayStation presentation on Wednesday. “But they have unfortunate consequences for console cost and form factor.”

So if PS4 isn’t rendering native 4K images, then what is it doing? Magic!

Above: With HDR on (right) and off (left).

Image Credit: Harrison Weber, VentureBeat

More importantly, Sony is making a smart sacrifice with 4K on the Pro. On PC, even $1,200 video cards struggle to run 4K games at 60 frames per second. That price is a nonstarter for a console. I would also argue that native 4K isn’t as important for the kind of experience that PlayStation 4 wants to give gamers. When you sit 10 feet away from your display, like most people do when they play consoles from a couch, the human eye struggles to see a difference between 1080p and 4K. It all starts to blur together when you observe it from far enough away.