Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro shows promise, potential and plenty of pretty lighting.

During last week’s official unveiling of the PlayStation 4 Pro, Sony executives and game developers peppered their presentations with plenty of technical jargon and sales pitches. Marketing buzzwords, such as “immersive” and “visceral” and technobabble like “temporal and spatial anti-aliasing algorithms,” were liberally used to describe the machine’s potential.

But it was the heroine of Electronic Arts’ upcoming “Mass Effect: Andromeda” who best summed up the PS4 Pro’s potential when she exclaimed, “The whole place is lighting up!” during an impressive gameplay preview.

While the character was actually referring to an impending alien attack in the game, she could have just as easily been talking about the PS4 Pro’s ability to turn every light-based effect into a candy-coated treat for the eyes.

Under the hood

Sporting a GPU twice as powerful as the PlayStation 4, a high-power CPU, a 1TB hard drive, 4K resolution and high-dynamic (HDR) support, the PS4 Pro won’t be wanting for back-of-the-box bullet points when it hits November 10 for $399.99. But it was the PS4 Pro’s HDR support that Sony was keen on showing off during up-close demos.

According to Sony CEO Andrew House, HDR “contributes to enhancements in visual clarity, color and luminance.” In other words, everything from sunsets to superpowers will look prettier on the PS4 Pro thanks to its ability to leverage a spectrum of colors so vast it could make a rainbow blush.

We got a convincing taste of this when producer Victor Harris played Bend Studio’s “Days Gone” on both a PS4 Pro and a standard PS4. When the open-world zombie game’s biker protagonist Deacon St. John lit up a horde of undead with a Molotov cocktail on the regular PS4, the corpse-cooking flames all looked similar. With HDR enabled on the PS4 Pro, though, they looked noticeably better. Different degrees of brightness and various shades of orange and red almost had us smelling the charred flesh.



Matt Cabral, Contributor.
Full story at Yahoo News.