Playstation held a meeting on the 7th of September where we were anticipating them to officially reveal the code named Neo.
The meeting started with Andrew House coming onto stage and announcing that 40 million PS4’s have been sold. Next he announced the Playstation 4 Slim, which leaked nearly three weeks prior. What was surprising is that the slim model is going to be the standard PS4 moving forward. The slim has the same components as the original model but has been shrunk down into a body 40% smaller. This console will launch September 15th for £249/$299
Next he announced the Neo – now named Playstation 4 Pro. It supposedly supports 4K and HDR gaming and video playback, but it doesn’t play 4K Blu-Ray discs.
He introduced Mark Cerny who came out to talk about the hardware. The new console has more than double GPU power than the original and supports a boosted clock rate. The Pro comes with a 1TB hardrive (not too impressive considering an edition of the Xbox One S came with a 2TB) What was interesting was the fact that if you upgrade your game library will synch over – which was an early indicator that current PS4 games are compatible with the Pro.
Next up we saw some games that are HDR and 4K supported. The showreel is below. Obviously you can’t see the full effects if you don’t have a 4K HDR display, but there is a noticeable difference.
It was made known that it would be developers choice if they wanted to engineer their games to perform to the Pros ability. In the meeting it was voiced that the models in games would be the same as the ones in the old PS4’s but the Pro runs them better. Additionally the Pro knows what type of display it is connected to so it can automatically upscale the game if you have a 4K HDR display and automatically descales it if you don’t. Furthermore, Cerny announced that there are more than a dozen patches coming from First Party and third party developers for current games to perform for the Pro.
Andrew House came back to the stage to talk about the PSN structure. It turns out (even though it was obvious) that PSN will continue to be one community. This means that players on the Pro will be ab
le to mingle with those on the old consoles. The Pro and the PS4 play the same discs – which means there will be a limited confusion with the consumers because they could pick up any game from stores and it would work.
Also announced was that Call of Duty Infinite Warfare will be enhanced for the pro and Black Ops 3 will get a patch to so it will also be supported buy the Pro. This was our first indication of a release date for the Pro.
Following these announcements, Aaryn Flynn took to the stage to make some EA related announcements. Battlefield 1 and Fifa 17 will be supported on the Pro. Excitably Mr Flynn also came to this meeting with the first public gameplay footage of Mass Effect Andromeda.
Wrapping up the meeting, Andrew House took centre stage to inform us that on day one, there will be a brand new Netflix app that supports 4K and HDR. With supported shows Narcos and Luke Cage. A new optimized YouTube app will be coming also.
The biggest announcement came by that every PS4 old and new will be HDR ready with a firmware update. That is huge news. In some peoples minds this puts Sony ahead of Microsoft.
The PS4 Pro will be available to buy on the 10th of November 2016 for $399/£350.
The whole meeting can be viewed below. The meeting itself ends at 53:00 minutes