I can see this being a recurring factor going forward. The obsession of better image quality for marketing purporses and sacrificing of framerate and responsiveness continues!

Oh no! 58fps rather than 60, the sky is falling.

We're all sacrificing so much performance for only tripling the pixel counts from 1920x1080 to 3200x1800. Literally missing a frame or two a second in some scenes, the literal end of the world for console games that normally are so perfect at never dropping the occasional frame.

Woe are we! [more discussion in the Pro thread]

The problem is it's almost certainly going to end up worse than these small differences eventually.

I sort of understand the push to have a 4k device ready for future video applications (yet no Blu-Ray wtf) but they should have limited games to 1080P to favour framerates over resolution. The differences between 1080P and their almost 4k/sometimes 4k games are negligible at the distances a lot of people sit from their displays, 30 vs. 60 fps is huge though.

If you want to run stuff like The Last of Us at 1080p60 locked then you can. Use a base PS4 or don't install the 1.07 patch that enables Pro mode and the choice of very high res of 4K native options (and your Pro will run just like the 60fps mode on the base console).

Like, how does manufacturing these tiny differences into some sort of scandal mean anything other than devs and Sony should ignore people for being more about the thrill of complaining than actually having something to complain about (really, literally 58fps is important - could anyone even see the dropped frames if given a double blind test?)

The move of consoles to resting at 30fps rather than pushing for 60 has been a long, long thing for consoles. That decision to pick better screenshots and videos over a more responsive high-framerate is in no way a new thing. This isn't the start of anything, this is a long long history of console not giving the range of choice that you find on PC to pick your own features that are important. And these games aren't dropping framerate. Most of the Pro mode games are actually pushing up framerates (eg BF1) and these ones being shown here dropping the occasional frames are something that may well be fixed with patches (as all games get, these being literally a few days old on launch hardware firmware).

Also, the difference in visuals is something that, if you can't see clearly, you don't need to sit nearer the screen, you need glasses. It's not exactly subtle with these aliasing issues causing flickering pixel details.

The drops are sometimes more than your "2 fps". And also a person with a 1080 set and PS4 pro has no way of taking advantage of the pro whatsoever in some of those games without a frame rate drop. That's bad

"No way of taking advantage" vs reality.

The irony is that the quality of the presentation when downsampled to 1080p is really impressive - a clear visual upgrade over the base PS4 title. PS4 Pro owners who haven't made the jump to a 4K screen are definitely in for a treat here. It's important to point out that PS4 Pro's BF1 enhancements are not simply limited to resolution. Moving through some of the more demanding areas of the campaign, Pro frame-rates are significantly improved over the more variable base PlayStation 4 version, so it's clear that some GPU power has been dedicated to ensuring a smoother experience overall - not just in upping pixel-count.

this is predicated on the assumption that everyone wants or cares about 60fps. i would hazard to guess your average consumer is happier with the prettier looking visuals. either way wouldn't mind if some patches "fixed" the framerate, we'll see.

@shivoa: I can quote too, and I can also use complete sentences without taking things out of context

"no way of taking advantage of the pro whatsoever in some of those games without a frame rate drop."

Frame rate > graphics. Every. fucking. damn. time.

@forteexe21: Welcome to the PC sisterhood. Every button under the sun and most of them can make the frames draw faster. None of this being forced to accept the decisions the dev made about choosing between visuals and framerate.

@vortextk: Your comment about "a person with a 1080 set" was clearly directed at claiming that there aren't visual upgrades without 4K TVs, something definitely totally false. And also these often comes with framerate increases, as noted in the quote. Why even bring up 1080p unless you were aiming along this line about not being able to see clear visual upgrades.

@ripelivejam: anyone that plays tiranfall of cod does. Why do you think Battlefield used to be 30 and then went 60? People may not be able to articulate why COD always felt better, but it did.

True but the simple resolution bump of the pro doesn't actually add that much to visuals by itself. I think smoother framerates (and higher ones) will be more noticeable for most people. Especially if you have people buying Pros without 4k displays.

My biggest issue with the PS4 Pro is their shady marketing. It's not a 4k machine, very little is gonna run at 4k. I would definitely prefer 1080P with smoother or higher framerates than the minor resolution bumps most games are running on.

I guess it's not THAT different to the last consoles outputting 1080P with hardly any games natively running at it. Still, I feel this time they've been pushing the 4k aspect a lot when in reality you're only getting 4k in older games or simpler ones.

I like how this console does 1080p at 4K - click through to the source 4K png image and look at how little of this isn't doing a pretty grand job of cleaning away any aliasing from the upscale (I mean, you have to actually look closely to realise Dishonored 2 is rendering what seems to be most of the scene at 1080p on the Pro):

It will be interesting to see how it will begin to effect users. I can handle drops from 60-50 but as soon as 40s hit things feel jarring. I also have to get used to 30 when its locked but if it drops below 30 at all it feels super bad for me.

I had a friend who claimed framerate didn't matter to him, but then asked if ds2 ran at 60 on xboxone because 3 felt so sluggish lol. I think fps is something you dont notice until you're constantly exposed to higher frames. I also think the better graphics get the more noticeable its gotten, well at least for me.

Hopefully they join the pc wagon and give users options, let me turn off supersampling if I want etc. Or let me even lock the framerate to whatever number i want, i used to lock to 45fps etc.

The apologists in this thread are failing to realize that even Sony in their Pro documents clearly state that higher resolution and or other visual fidelity can not result in lower framerate than what is in the base model.

They need to have more settings like in Rise of Tomb Raider where you can choose higher fidelity or resolution or high framerate.

@colourful_hippie: Got a public source for that position or are you referring to leaked internal documents?

Also 58fps vs 60fps is a small delta, not actually something you'd call different performance. They're performing about the same.

@shivoa: Yes, they're in the leaked internal documents. Here's the part where Digital Foundry refers to them.

Even if you want to call 2 frames negligible, Deus Ex Mankind Divided says hello coming in at 20 fps in spots.

Deus Ex seems like the only offender who should have not made it through the cert with the Sony directive in place. But these are "launch" games, not everything is perfect right off the bat. These discussions seems way overblown, including this thread title - no offense to the OP. You see clickbait-ish videos like that on Youtube etc. You can call me an apologist all you want, yes - I do own the new machine and want it to perform well, but my experience with it has been stellar so far. I have't played Deus Ex so far, so I can not comment on that yet.

Hm, and here I thought the controversy was going to be about games which turn into slideshows on the original PS4 and run smoothly on the Pro. Hell, I'd imagine Fallout 4 could end up in this space.

Some people are saying "what's the big deal, it's just 58 fps instead of 60, who can tell the difference?"

The big problem with this is vsync. If you have vsync enabled, then the game will wait until the frame refreshes before starting to render the new frame, locking the frame updates in the game to the screen refreshing. If you miss the 16.6 millisecond rendering deadline required for 60 fps, it has to wait another 16.6 milliseconds before starting work on the next frame. Meaning, if the games consistently generates each frame at 17 milliseconds, you either get a framerate of 30 fps, or screen-tearing if vsync is turned off.

So yes, you would notice it.

I figure in 2-3 weeks, this will be fixed with a firmware update. It's a product launch. Things are always bumpy.

@gkhan: i havent seen anybody reporting that happening, the system is out so these arent hypothetical reports.

I've been really negative about this whole thing in the run up but even I did not expect this.

You... Oh God... You just described a game's framerate cratering from 60fps to 30fps and then pretended it would look like 58fps on the analysis being done here.

Please stop trying to turn this into something that'll be ruinous by making up what isn't being shown here and then saying that the thing that isn't happening here would look bad.

@shivoa: I'm not trying to spread FUD or "turn this into something ruinous" (I'm picking up a PS4 Pro myself in a few days), I'm just trying to clarify the issue from a developer perspective.

So, to be more clear: if a you get a spike over 16.6 ms on a single frame during a second (maybe there was a particularly heavy AI pathing calculation that frame, or something), but all other frames render under 16.6 ms, then all that happens is that a single frame is dropped and you get 59 fps. Presumably that's what's happening here. The situation I'm described only happens when you consistently miss your render time targets. 16.6 ms is a bright red line: if you render consistently under it, you're golden, if you're consistently over it (even by a tiny bit), you're screwed.

But the problem is that if you're making a 60 fps game, you never want to cross that red line. You very much develop all your systems so that they will be able to hit 60 fps. If you're riding that close to the line, then your game will unpredictably drop frames, and you can easily get into a situation where, for whatever reason (more enemies than normally on the screen, more physics interactions, more particle effects, more whatever), you can find that you're unexpectedly consistently missing your target.

Maybe this is going to be a total non-issue. But as a developer, dropping below 60 fps in any situation is cause for serious worry.

@gkhan:Welcome to the club of rendering engineers.

I still have no idea why you posted what you did in this thread as it was purely misleading in the context of what's actually shown in the analysis being discussed.

Pretty sure most gamers are aware of what a dropped frame is. If you consistently miss that 16.7ms scan-out then you don't drop to 30fps. Once you drop one frame then you're about 16ms ahead of where you need to be so are going to be constantly sliding slightly (slowly moving towards another dropped frame). 17-18ms frame render times lead to slight framerate drops, not constantly missing draw-outs, because you don't reset the render when you miss. You'd need to be taking around 33ms per frame to drop to a stable 30. Your post seems to assume there is only a single frame buffer (so it blocks and stalls the rendering) rather than the standard multiple buffers used. Even if we did assume a single buffer (which we shouldn't), plenty of engines use deferred rendering so would still free up the G-Buffer and so start rendering the next frame immediately, not waiting for the next scan-out.

Maybe you've had some really bad luck with engines, but what you describe is not something you should be worrying about (if it is then I wish you all the luck in your next project with a nicer engine). Especially on consoles where you've got a pretty fixed profile. When your render times go up from 16ms to 17ms, you should be pretty ok. Ideally you never drop a frame, but tuning everything to never drop a frame is basically impossible unless you really hamper how long you've got to render a typical frame.

Way, way too early to make sweeping claims about the quality of the PS4 pro, or the ports, in my opinion. It's a waste of time. Looking at the gaf threads with impressions & images from actual owners it appears to be rather mixed quality in reality. Some games have nothing but benefits and look beautiful. Some games look the same. Some do perform worse in cases. Generally I would say the experience, as reported by owners, is positive. Take that as you will.

I'm not sure we're from the same planet duder! I'm an avid viewer of Digital Foundry, as you may also... From what I know, there are scarcely any AAA games which never drop below 60 fps on console. In fact drops are common. So... is it really cause for serious worry? Or are you talking about something else I'm not understanding?

Here's my question: Why no options? Why on a PS4 can I not just tell Last of Us to run in 1080p mode? Why do I HAVE to accept a frame rate drop to run at 4k super sampled because that's what the developer wanted? I don't mind them offering the option, I just feel like the lack of options provided by Sony and developers at this point is really disheartening. Take a game like Watch Dogs 2: Why am I forced in to a super sampled 4K checkerboard on a Pro? Why no option to run at 1080p unlocked? It may not hit perfect 60 every time, but i'll take wobbly 50-60 over wobbly 25-30 any day.

I get the machine is all about 4k, but giving 1080p gamers zero reason to own or use a Pro (and many reasons to skip it all together with the current trend) is disappointing.

e: And before anyone does the rabble rabble PC's are for options thing, I'm not asking for PC level options here. I'm asking for a couple of basic toggles. Let me prefer frame rate over resolution, or resolution over frame rate. It's a choice I would make differently in different games.

We're going to redirect everyone over to the existing PS4 Pro thread, as that one has been going on a while longer and this one started out kinda youtube-spammy.

Thanks.