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Buyer Beware: PS4 Pro Breaks Games Like Skyrim and More!

Buyer Beware: PS4 Pro Breaks Games Like Skyrim and More!

The PlayStation 4 Pro is officially out in the wild, and early adopters like myself are eagerly booting up supported titles to see how they benefit from running on beefed-up hardware. The list of Pro-compatible games is fairly slim at the moment – I’m holding out for The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy XV , personally – but it’s plain to see that the system is capable of some impressive graphical feats with the right display. It’s simultaneously one of those things you have to see to believe and an admittedly frivolous upgrade that only the staunchest videophiles (like me) will find worthwhile.

Yet we’ve read some troubling reports that a handful of PS4 games are actually running worse , not better, on the Pro. It beggars belief, but games like The Last of Us Remastered , World of FInal Fantasy , and Skyrim: Special Edition do indeed perform worse on the Pro than they do on the standard model. How in the world is this even remotely acceptable?

In the case of The Last of Us Remastered, the game actually has to downsample to run at a resolution lower than 4K, which causes issues with its performance. It’s mind-boggling that lowering settings makes the game run worse on more powerful hardware. Skyrim Special Edition , on the other hand, looks beautiful at 4K, but its frame rate pays the price and is no longer locked at 30FPS. I was under the impression that the entire point of the PS4 Pro was to make games look better or run better, if not both. For any of the system’s purported benefits to come at the expense of stable performance is vexing, to say the least.

Initially, our fears ran in the opposite direction – that the Pro would be a mandatory upgrade. But Sony specifically stated prior to the launch of the Pro that they would require developers to make games for the standard PS4 as a baseline, and only then could they choose to make use of the Pro’s additional processing power. According to the official PS4 Pro FAQ on the PlayStation Blog, “It’s important to note that PS4 Pro is not another generation of console. It won’t make your current PS4 games obsolete, and it won’t split the PS4 player base. PS4 Pro is very much a part of the PS4 family.”

Buyer Beware: PS4 Pro Breaks Games Like Skyrim and More!

But then we have games like Watch Dogs 2, which reportedly dips below 30FPS regularly, sometimes even dropping into the teens, on a standard PS4. A PlayStation blog post has revealed that the game’s PS4 Pro support includes faster load times and a more stable frame rate, among other upgrades. But if buying a Pro is the only way to enjoy Watch Dogs 2 at a consistent frame rate, then Ubisoft and Sony have effectively flipped original PS4 customers the bird. The Pro should offer enhancements to games that are already functionally and visually satisfactory instead of being the only way to “fix” poorly-performing titles.

As it stands, this sends a mixed message to PS4 owners. Upgrading to a Pro should be a luxury, not a necessity, and the improvements it offers should never come with a downside. Luckily, the problems with Pro performance seem to be rooted in software, not hardware. Developers haven’t had much time to figure out how to best use the Pro’s additional processing power, so there’s hope that they’ll work these kinks out before long. Upcoming games like Nioh will feature options that let players prioritize either resolution or frame rate, which seems like a fair compromise to me if optimizing both is too taxing for the hardware. All I’m saying is that I didn’t drop money on upgrading a perfectly functional console just to have it unexpectedly bite me in the ass. Here’s hoping developers get these issues sorted sooner rather than later.

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