Be Warned: Some Games Run Worse On PS4 Pro

Be Warned: Some Games Run Worse On PS4 Pro

The PlayStation 4 Pro should be a straight forward deal: you pay a premium for the upgraded PS4 and in return you get to play *some* games at 4K resolution or at 1080p with a solid 60 frames per second. In practice however, it turned up not to be that simple.

While a lot of PS4 Pro-optimized games take advantage of the console's increased GPU and CPU performance to run better, some games actually run worse on the more powerful hardware.

"The bottom line is this: for games like Skyrim, The Last of Us and Mantis Burn Racing, gameplay will actually be smoother overall on base PlayStation 4 hardware," said EuroGamer's Richard Leadbetter. "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a little more complicated: we find that some scenes play at a noticeably lower frame-rate, while others hand in more consistent performance overall."

PlayStation 4 does not support 1080p resolution directly. Instead, it renders everything at full 4K resolution, then downscales it to 1080p. This technique is called super-sampling and it provides more detailed and crisper images with relatively high performance impact. Unfortunately, there is no way to disable super-sampling and have the games render at 1080p when connected to a standard Full-HD screen.

The crisper images and increased details are definitely worth the framerate drop on a 4K screen, but it is unreasonable to suffer from framerate fluctuations at 1080p only to get slightly better anti-aliasing.