Sony has some good news for those of you thinking of picking up a new console. The PS4 Neo, or as it shall henceforth be known after the company's official unveiling, the PS4 Pro, will play games that look better than they do on the PS4 model that launched in 2013.
It will support 4K display features such as increased resolution and High-Dynamic Range (HDR) thanks to what system architect Mark Cenry described as specialized rendering techniques optimized to the PS4 Pro hardware.
It's not native 4K resolution, but in any case, the support is there to at least some degree. Sony showed off games like the upcoming Spider-Man game from Insomniac and Watch Dogs 2, highlighting how far-off characters were displayed in crisp sharpness.
More good news: some of your favorite games may have already been patched to support PS4 Pro. Currently-existing games like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Paragon were shown, both with visuals that trumped the base PS4's capabilities. For further examples, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare will support PS4 Pro, but so too will CoD: Black Ops 3.
PlayStation VR games in particular will feel an impact. While Sony has decreed that PS4 Pro will not have any exclusives, developers are able to take advantage of the increased power to help their games run more impressively. One PSVR game, Farpoint, was shown as having double the pixel count on PS4 Pro.
Now, some of the images above may not seem to really represent the differences between the old hardware and the new. Such are the limitations of livestreams and image compression so that this article doesn't break your internet. However, these two images below, even at sub-4K resolution, should help show what differences we'll see. First, an image with HDR turned off:
And now, with HDR turned on:
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