The 4K Lie?

You have to wonder about Sony, a company that inexplicably chose to introduce its new PlayStation 4 Pro on the same day that Apple unleashed the iPhone 7. But now the firm is facing more serious questions: Are the PS4 Pro’s vaunted 4K capabilities even real? Is it all a lie?

This is coming up now because the video game blogosphere—sort of a sub-culture within a sub-culture—has been busy dismantling Sony’s claims since the PS4 Pro announcement event. And in speaking to third party developers, especially, what they’ve found is that most games will not in fact run at native 4K resolutions on the PS4 Pro.

How serious is this issue? Even Microsoft, one of the more oblivious tech firms when it comes to advertising and competitive comparisons, has latched on like the proverbial pit bull. It says that its coming 4K console, code-named Xbox “Project Scorpio,” will offer “true 4K gaming.” You know, unlike the fake 4K gaming that Sony will offer.

“Any games we’re making that we’re launching in the Scorpio time frame, we’re making sure they can natively render at 4K,” Microsoft general manager Shannon Loftis told USA Today recently.

Riiight. Well, here’s your Monday morning reality check: That’s just hearsay, word-shaped air, since Xbox “Project Scorpio”—as its name suggests—doesn’t even exist yet. It’s vaporware. And for the next magical few months, it can be whatever Microsoft says it is. And then reality will come crashing down hard, as it so often does.

But let’s forget about Microsoft for a moment. Let’s focus instead on Sony, and the claims that it made during its PS4 unveil. Emphasis below is mine.

“Our goal is to deliver high-fidelity graphical experiences,” PlayStation lead system architect Mark Cerney said at the time. “We more than doubled the power of the GPU and adopted many new features from the AMD ‘Polaris’ architecture and even beyond. A number of hardware innovations support efficient rendering for 4K displays, allowing titles on PS4 Pro to reach resolutions not thought possible on consoles in 2016. We [also] boosting the clock rate of the CPU.”

To be clear, you don’t have to read that too careful to see that Sony’s claims are, at least thus far, measured and non-hyperbolic.

“The result of all these improvements is a console that provides unparalleled experiences for the 4K TV owner,” he continues, “and truly excellent enhancements for those using HDTV as well.” Cerney then goes on to mention that HDR has a huge impact on gaming as well, and that the new console has enhancements for VR.

But let’s focus on 4K, since this seems to be the pedantic tipping point for critics.

After providing a good explanation of why the 8 million pixels provided by 4K displays is so much more impressive than the 1-2 million found on HDTV, Cerney actually addresses the fact that “brute force” 4K rendering would be prohibitively expensive on a console. So the PS4 Pro instead uses custom hardware that provides what he calls “streamlined rendering techniques.” I assume what he means by this is upscaling.

Upscaling is an ugly word in the video game industry. Upscaling is how a game maker “fakes” native resolution, or in this case, how a game maker can create a title that comes “impressively close to realizing the complete potential of 4K displays.”

The further we get into this, the more I’m confused by the brouhaha. Sony, through Mr. Cerney, is very clear about the PS4 Pro’s 4K capabilities, I think, and that game makers, as always, will need to make resolution sacrifices, typically to meet frame-rate needs. The promise of the PS4 Pro, as I see it, isn’t artificially hitting 4K resolutions at all times, damn the costs. But is rather about providing resolutions that are consistently better than 1080p and combining this functionality with HDR, which is truly transformative, plus VR for those who want it. These things, together, I think, fulfill the promise of a “PS4 Pro.”

Some don’t see it that way, of course. And pushed about whether PS4 Pro would in fact deliver native 4K resolutions in games, various Sony representatives have more recently stated, more clearly, that they will not.

“The majority [of games on PS4 Pro] will be upscaled [to 4K], at least based on the game portfolio I have seen to date,” Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Andrew House told Digital Spy. “I don’t think [it’s misleading]. I think that whatever the term is, it’s a question of whether people see a demonstrable difference in the game experience or not, rather than the term we use to apply to it. That’s what people are looking for and they’ll make their judgment as to whether that’s working for them or not.”

That said, a Digital Spy follow-up post noted that while “the current roster of games will be upscaled, future titles will run natively in 4K to take advantage of the PS4 Pro’s increased hardware.” There was no attribution for that claim, however.

Which makes a VentureBeat interview with Guerrilla Games’s Hermen Hulst interesting and relevant.

“The big thing about the Pro is it can handle 4K and HDR,” he says. “First, I can tell you that it’s massive in terms of the visual difference … Our games have been running HDR since Killzone 3. But only now do we have displays that can actually show that … A lot of the content in the game is identical. It’s just shown now on these very high-end displays.”

“There’s a lot of magic happening,” he says, “It’s not native 4K, but as you’ve seen for yourself on the screens, it’s acceptably so. It’s close enough that you can’t see the difference with normal human eyes.”

Hulst suggests that the combination of better-than-1080p resolutions and HDR is what will put these titles over the top, and I can say from my experience with an HDR-enabled 4K UHD display that this technology is indeed transformative, even without HDR-enabled games.

“The biggest thing will be HDR, because it’s quite a paradigm shift in how you deal with color,” Hulst exlains. “It gets very nerdy at this point. HDR involves a richer color palette, so we’ll have to rewire how we deal with this, how we can make sure it looks good on both displays. It’ll always look better on an HDR 4K display, but it’ll still look stunning on a normal display.”

You don’t have to know too much about gaming and the issues with pumping pixels in fast-moving games and maintaining frame rates to know that “4K gaming,” taken pedantically, is simply not achievable on a console today. Not unless you blur the definition of console to include much more powerful and expensive hardware, that is. But Sony’s approach—which I assume will be similar to Microsoft’s—is correct. And when you view the new slimmer PS4 and PS4 Pro as a product family where the latter is a subset of the former and can play all the same games, the strategy becomes clear.

On a related note, the criticism of Sony and of the PS4 Pro’s inability to natively render most if not all games at consistent 4K resolutions is just the same knee-jerk nonsense that we saw when these same video game bloggers complained about the supposed death of Xbox exclusives. Their inability to accept change has triggered a strange circle-jerk of criticism, this time aimed at Sony.

But as with the fears about Xbox Play Anywhere, the criticisms are misplaced. Sony has been clear, I think, about the capabilities of its PS4 Pro, and how it fits into the evolving PlayStation product family and strategy. And it’s really not all that different from what Microsoft is doing, except for that one, most crucial of differences: Sony’s 4k/VR beast arrives this year, unlike Microsoft’s. Ruh-roh, indeed.