Found this on reddit/ps4/ this morning and if this true, finally makes PS4 Pro more valuable

http://imgur.com/6uJMTnj

http://imgur.com/y29B1or

Speaking of the 4.50 update - It will now allow the PS4 to support external hard drives and NOT limited to 2TB!!! I just ordered a 4TB USB 3.0 external for $109 for this very reason. Suck it, 500GB internal drive.

@tanookisuit: That is great news.

thats the literal first news that really makes the ps4 pro an interesting buy now.

I wonder how that would work if a game is hard locked to 30fps? I remember the wonkiness involved in making the first dark souls 60fps, or arkham knight. Both created crazy unexpected glitches and both required file edits.

@tanookisuit: The limit is apparently 8TB. My only complaint is that Sony keep using all their USB ports up and didn't put enough on the system. I use one for the wireless headset dongle, one to charge. Now I need to get a wall charger or something because I'm absolutely going to want to plug in an external HDD.

@oursin_360: The text description tells you to turn it off if there's unexpected behaviour so I wouldn't be surprised if this was an entirely "use at your own risk" kind of thing.

F-Zero voice: YOU GOT BOOST POWER

I still have a 500gb drive in my ps4 and Ive never had trouble with running out of storage. If you're done playing a game, delete it.

@oursin_360: I believe digital foundry specified that games will NOT go over their capped limits. So if s game is locked at 30 it'll stay there. Maybe it'll be more stable but you won't see a huge improvement. But still, this is awesome for fans like dark souls or bloodborne that sometimes struggle to hit thst 30 mark.

I literally just traded in my old PS4 and got a pro for 200 bucks. Now I feel even better about my purchase!

I agree. But usually when I tell people this they get pissy and act like I'm being unreasonable. Asking them to reinstall something if they decide to play it later.

@sterling: I agree with the sentiment. However, as someone who likes to replay games and doesn't have super fast internet, if I need to re-download a 50gb game, that will take hours.

It's not as big of an issue deleting discs but even then, a lot of games have huge patches.

@pompouspizza: But are you really going to replay that game? Really? Are you? Be honest.

@sterling: @pompouspizza: Yes, some people do replay games. It's incredibly easy to fill up 500gb and my isp just started data cap. I've had to delete some digital content that's massive and redownloading them sucks. This is a good thing.

Doom is a prime example. Beat it and want to play it again on a harder difficultly but had to delete for now.

I have video game ADHD. I play game for a few hours, then play something else the next day for a few hours. Then I come back to it a few days later. So having a bigger hard drive is not a bad idea. Very rarely have I solely dedicated my playtime to just one game for weeks straight. It basically whatever I am in the mood to play. A lot of those games have 30-50gb installs so 500gb is not enough.

Redownloading patches for all these game would kill my bandwith cap as well.

Yes. Really. I was incredibly sad when I had to delete DOOM because it was taking up an unreasonable amount more than any other game I had installed. I beat DOOM once, but will definitely be going back to it again - I had the itch the other day to go back to hell, but finding more stuff to delete that I'm currently playing is beyond obnoxious. It steered me into waiting and playing more Let it Die instead...which is also loosely set in "Hell", so I guess I still did the thing I wanted, but ultimately not with the correct game. It is a problem.

@sterling: I would typically agree with this but games/ patches are HUGE now. The full install of the first season of HITMAN is almost 60 gb with more content to be.added. That's over 10%. Something to consider is that 500 gb is actually 400 and change after formatting. Not hard to fill up with a handful of big release. Also data caps are a huge concern. Re-downloading 60 gb is not an easy choice for some people especially over a relatively slow network like psn.

Just give me that proper frame rate for bloodborne.

The main issue for me has been co-op and multiplayer games. I got way into Titanfall 2, but I do have one friend who that game didn't click with. We both agreed Infinite Warfare was awful, so he's still playing Black Ops 3. Unfortunately, I can't join him anymore, because I deleted that and Destiny so I could install Titanfall 2 and a couple of other games lately.

For me, it's less about replaying entire single player campaigns, and more about being able to briefly go back to older games now and then.

The Evil Within shows a noticeable performance increase when you compare the base PS4 mode and the new PS4 Pro boost mode.

@cliffordbanes: That's cool, that game could definitely use a bump. There is a part near the end that runs, I'm guessing, in the single digits.

As someone who's not looking to buy a Pro, I really hope this doesn't just mean dogshit performances on the standard PS4 from new releases going forward. That's not gonna push me to buy another console, it'll just make me stop buying games there.

Downloading some of my older games like Witcher 3 and such to the Pro to test B-B-B-B-Boost mode!

I'm hopeful, so far Pro patches games have worked out great for me.

@tanookisuit: I thought it supported them already?

EDIT: Just read the Waypoint article and everything makes sense to me now.

I wonder if this will fix the frame pacing in Bloodborne or just alleviate some of the framerate drops.

Haven't tested a lot of games yet. Yakuza feels better when running around the city. Not sure what the framerate is, but it's more consistent.

@megabattimus: I just read that article. Who the hell buys two of the same console for more hard drive space? Especially when it already has a removable and up-gradable hard drive? After reading that everything make far less sense to me now that i have read THAT!

But on topic, these are nice updates, and makes me consider upgrading to a PRO a little more.

Yeah, I'm kinda worried that the promise of base PS4 staying relevant will come to an end sooner rather than later.

@cliffordbanes: Just ran around for 15 minutes in the hunters nightmare and honestly I wasn't able to tell too much of a difference. But it was a short amount of time, and I feel like normally it runs pretty well; it's only when you do large, bloody visceral attacks or get into really large groups that it starts to drop.

I did test on a game that is super easy to both feel and see the frame drops (Rocket League) and it made a remarkable difference IMO. I remember trying to play on the OG ps4 and even just trying to play 2 player split-screen (much less 3-4 player) the game and controller input just got super sluggish. Tried running an exhibition with 3 people (me and my two feet) and it was super noticeable how much better it was. I suppose they could have ninja-ed in a pro patch for rocket league; but if not it makes it actually playable for more than 1 person on the same PS4.

I'll definitely be trying out some other games (DS3, Witcher 3) and spending more time in bloodbourne to see how noticeable it is. If anyone else has any games they'd be interested in me trying out, let me know and I'll see if I own them and can notice a difference.

While I dont doubt that the Pro has a generally improved framerate that gif is kind of dumb.

Panning the camera around tends to tank the framerate in a lot of games and the Pro vid didnt go all the way ;p

This generation of games has had mostly terrible performance from the outset. It's not like this changes anything for people who were already okay with that.

I just wish more games let you prioritise performance over visuals like Nioh does.

Can confirm Witcher 3 is significantly better in boost mode. No more frame drops in the cities and such.

Load times have also been much faster for me.

Is anyone sharing a PSN account that has 4.5 beta access so others can download it?

I have a couple games in my backlog that would really benefit from beast mode.

Anyone play any games where they actually saw issues or didn't see an improvement (if there needed to be an improvement like FPS being bad)?

Honestly all this PS4 Pro stuff makes me glad I upgraded my PC. This isn't why I got into console gaming nor do I think it's a direction they should be heading towards.

I mean seriously.. we got console games that performed shitty and now they released another whole console with no ambassador program and they're showing off how those past games they thought were O-K to sell at the time will finally perform as intended - and this is supposed to get people excited???

@humanity: There's plenty of PC games that run like crap that have no problem topping the Steam charts they don't even have to be finished either. AAA games make 90% of their income in the first few months, developers had no idea the Pro existed a year ago in what world would a developer make a game that run like crap for 90% of its audience with the hope that better hardware show up in the furture which has never happened before. Games release in poor states regardless of platform or hardward its all on the developer.

More like...BEAST mode

Am I right?

This aint meaning anything, dogshit performance has been a base feature from the start.

@thepanzini: This isn't just about games releasing in poor states, which in of itself is pretty terrible this generation and is absolutely the fault of developers, it's about a console that basically undermines the one that came before it while continuing to exist within the same cycle. It's about voiding the entire concept of a console being your one stop shop for all gaming during a single generation, knowing that this is it, this one box is what everyone has and no one has a leg up over anyone else. There was beauty in the uniformity of a console that you don't see on the PC where everyone has an incredibly personalized and unique setup. Furthermore you expect things to not always run smoothly on PC because that is how it has always been due to the radically diverse pool of hardware out there. It doesn't excuse bad PC releases, but there are ways around them that simply don't exist on the hermetically sealed console space. Wolfensetin the New Order was running poorly on my computer for no apparent reason and the developer wasn't releasing any patches to alleviate this issue. It happened to enough people that someone released a custom fix that completely fixed an otherwise unplayable game for me. On consoles you don't get that, which is why it is SO important that games release in the best possible light they can. The PS4 Pro is highlights just how poorly optimized a lot of these past releases were, and now you get the privilege of buying the exact same box over again simply to get "good" performance instead of "subpar" performance.

I just think the whole thing has been handled very poorly. If they announced the PS4 Pro with a solid trade-in program for your existing unit I would think this is a great idea. Send in your old model, pay a small difference, get the upgraded version. Let's slowly shift these old boxes out of circulation to pave the way for the newer version and a better gaming future for everyone. But not only did they not do this, they are continuing to sell Slims and oldschool PS4's while promoting the Pro like some premium VIP version. They made an underpowered console and thats fine. They could have ridden this out and just like with the 360 and PS3 we would start seeing games that look and run great as developers learn the ins and outs of the hardware over the natural span of it's cycle. But Sony wants to have their cake and eat it too by continuing to produce and sell the underpowered PS4 while actively promoting an extremely similar PS4 that will run all your games just a tad better. That is just shitty towards their consumers in my opinion. If they want to course correct thats fine, but don't pass buck onto your fanbase while also shaking them down in the process.

The first point has never been strictly true their has also been practically zero push back from the Pro majority of consumers don't agree in consoles being a one stop shop or seem to care. Having the Pro replace the Slim would be insane alot of consumers don't care about spec's and just want the cheapest price possible like wise alot of people care enough about spec's to spend extra, 40% of PS4 Pro purchasers in the UK were people we've not seen on the PlayStation 4 platform before. The PS4 is not underpowered its the best it could be for $400 which is the point of a console, underpowered compared to what? Its more powerful than both its nearest rivals, the 3DS was arguably underpowered but spanked the Vita on price what good is power if nowone buys it?

@thepanzini: If it's not underpowered then why have games been coming out with a lot of framerate problems, and why does the Pro exist with patches that will make those previously poorly performing games run better now? If the original is the best that it can be then how come the PS4 Pro is now $400 and is better? If consumers don't care about power then why bother investing all this money in developing and promoting a console that is competing with your existing product and it's only point of differentiation is power?

Also it is a lot more crazy to have two consoles in the same generation with wildly different specs than the Pro replacing the slim, or the entire original hardware lineup as a whole. As others have pointed out in the thread, sooner or later Sony will want to move away from the original PS4 and develop primarily for the Pro because it would be ridiculous to keep asking developers to optimize two versions of their game when they've clearly been having enough problems with just getting one out the door - and when that happens a lot of people are going to get screwed over.

I'm not strictly against the Pro. It is a fascinating idea to give your console a facelift midway through the cycle. That said I don't think the way they have gone about doing this has been executed very well.

I wonder if there will be any cases where a game has received a PS4 Pro patch that has improved graphics but some people will prefer playing an unpatched retail disc copy of the game offline with boost mode enabled instead to get a better framerate instead of improved graphics.

Framerate issues are due to poor optimization by software developers and the fact they devs aren't perfect. It's the same reason why u can have the best PC money can buy and some games will still have issues running well.

The Pro was released 3 years after the regular PS4. PS4 was the best Sony could do for $400 that they felt could satisfy them as a business and us as consumers. It's pretty much the same reason the Pro exists; to make money by catering to certain consumers. After 3 years it stands to reason that hardware costs would come down, allowing $400 to net a better console.

Pro patches and boost mode are there to incentivise Pro owners and increase the value proposition to potential owners.

nb Panzini indicated a lot of customers (not all) don't care about power. Pro caters to those that do. It also caters to those who would have bought a regular PS4 for $400 and instead of saving money would rather go Pro and get a bigger bang without changing their budget.

I feel like this is getting way blown out of proportion. Outside of enthusiast communities with stuff like the DS/BB players that care about timing and frames and the like, this probably will just be a nice little wuality of life thing.

Games should already be pretty damn steady about hitting their fps cap. Most seem to be on Xbox that I play I can't imagine there are that many titles struggling to run right at their cap, meaning the improvement will be fairly small unless a game happens to have an unlocked framerate, which is extremely uncommon.

@greedzen: and it is all creating a divide that isn't healthy for what should be a uniform ecosystem.

@humanity: Why is a divide unhealthy? PC seems to do alright, and why should it always be a uniform system? As long as MP runs at the same frame-rate on both (which is on the dev), it doesn't matter that the Pro looks a little better etc. Most consumers also seem to disagree its unhealthy and it should be a uniform ecosystem.