Not Every Game Will Perform Better On PS4 Pro

There were a lot of questions going in regarding the PS4 Pro and just how much of a performance boost the system would provide for some games. Well, it turns out that not every game will perform better on the PS4.

Gamespot is reporting that following the unveiling of the PS4 Pro last week they managed to get in some questions with the developers about whether or not the games would run at higher frame-rates on the PS4 Pro. One such game is Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was one of the showcase games for Sony's new 4K-enabled game console. However, according to BioWare producer Fabrice Condominas, the upcoming sci-fi space opera will not run any different on the PS4 Pro compared to the PS4.

It was revealed that Mass Effect: Andromeda will be 30fps on both iterations of the PlayStation 4. Some gamers had hoped that it would be 60fps on the PS4 Pro since the system has a slight bump up in specs over the standard PS4. But it's a no-go.

One game might be a fluke or an anomaly, but what happens when it's two games? Or three games? Jason Connell from Sucker Punch Productions, the makers of the Infamous games, revealed that Infamous: Second Son and Infamous: First Light on the PS4 Pro would not receive any frame-rate buffs going from the PS4 to the PS4 Pro.

Naughty Dog tried talking around the issue, but also ended up admitting that the frame-rates for Uncharted 4 would also stay the same between the vanilla PS4 and the PS4 Pro in an interview with Game Informer.

So basically, many of the major new games coming out and some of the games that have already come out this gen won't be getting any graphical boosts from being on the PS4 Pro. However, Sony is promising 4K gaming on the PS4 Pro, although there hasn't been any clear indication on if they mean 4K upscaling or 4K native rendering.

One of the big selling points for the PS4 Pro is that it will supposedly be able to run games in 4K resolution, a resolution that consists of 8.3 million pixels at an aspect ratio of 16:9. That is 6.2 million more pixels than the 1920 x 1080p resolution that the Xbox One and vanilla PS4 currently struggle to render at the moment, and that makes 4K four times more demanding than the standard 1080p requirements that have been around this gen.

Based on the current specifications of the PS4 Pro, it's certainly not four times more powerful than the vanilla PS4 and is still running on a slightly bumped up Jaguar APU with higher clock speeds and more compute units on the graphics chip. But the console is no where near powerful enough to run high-end AAA games at a native 4K resolution.

Some gamers are speculating that the PS4 Pro will only upscale games to 4K and won't actually run them natively at that resolution, meaning that the difference in graphic sharpness from the PS4 to the PS4 Pro may not be as grand as you might be hoping. Worse yet is that not every game will also take advantage of the small hardware upgrade to offer better frame-rate performance either.