Gadgetory

so the ps4 pro is out and a big question a lot of you are still having is is it worth grabbing over a regular ps4 slim especially if you don't own a 4k TV and the answer to that is maybe normally this question would be a little bit more open and shut but the thing keeping the ps4 Pro so competitive is it's ridiculously affordable price point of $400 only a hundred bucks more than a brand-new slim the ps4 Pro is obviously bigger than the slim in every direction which means that it will be taking up much more of your shelf space especially with how deep it runs on top of that while the aesthetics are similar here and of course personal taste will vary I gotta say that I think the slim just looks way way better than the pro the triple stacking was just not a great call however there are some functional upgrades that the pro does offer while both systems have a pair of USB ports on the front the pro offers an additional USB port on the back along with having an optical port one minor thing I do like about the slim / the pro though is the placement of its power and eject buttons they're easy to reach but make it really difficult to accidentally press whereas the pros are front facing on a little flap and while still better than a touch button are still the kind of thing that could get hit by accident pretty easily now of course physical form is only so important what most of you are really wondering is how much more powerful the pro is in practice while spec wise the ps4 Pro is clearly more powerful in the name of compatibility Sony has made it so that unless a game receives a specific pro support patch the ps4 pro intentionally will limit itself to run those games at the same level as a regular ps4 would so for games that don't offer support Pro patches for instance blood-borne and witcher 3 the pro is offering you nothing over the slim but there are a lot of games especially recent Sony exclusives and triple-a titles that are offering pro support and what exactly this means ranges wildly from game to game for instance uncharted 4 runs at a native resolution of 1440 P and then gets up scaled to 4k while the last of us running in 30 FPS mode is actual native 4k there's also upcoming games like horizon zero dawn and Mass Effect Andromeda that will use what's known as checkerboarding which while not as good as native 4k does come much much closer than traditional scaling so yes certain games will look better on a pro if you own a 4k TV but what about if your TV is only 1080p well once again this varies by game but the coverage for the most part so far is pretty minor some games offer graphical improvements like better anti-aliasing or higher and more stable frame rates a common benefit for Sony exclusives including VR games is using super sampling in which the pro will run a game at a higher native resolution and then downscale it to 1080p displays which is an improvement but the gain is more minut it's also worth noting that while most games look prettier some unpatched games even some pro supported games are actually getting worse performance on the pro compared to the slim for instance world of Final Fantasy has noticeably lower visual quality with blurry backgrounds and some pro supported games have less consistent frame rates one other question I've seen pop up is whether or not the pros sata3 interface for hard drives allows for faster loading times and the answer is yes but not really enough to matter after trying a number of different titles the ps4 Pro either loaded up at the same speed as the ps4 slim or beat it by a matter of a few seconds I haven't tested this with a switched in SSD but other reports seem to confirm the same thing better but by such a small margin it really doesn't matter now aside from gaming the only other big performance feature the pro has to offer is of course 4k media which in its case only applies to streaming services you can stream 4k videos on Netflix or YouTube which the slim can't but if you were looking for UHD blu-ray support both systems are going to fail you on that front so if you don't own a 4k TV there really aren't that many benefits to grabbing a pro over the slim if you're a first-time buyer I'd still say the Pro is worth paying $100 extra for for the bigger hard drive and visual improvements for a small handful of games but if you already own a slim or a launch ps4 there really is no reason to upgrade your system unless you own a 4k TV or you just enjoy burning money