Topic: Infamous Second Son is a beast on PS4 Pro

@BAMozzy: Yes mate! I've never gamed above 1080p so seeing infamous at a much higher resolution has really sorted my expectations out. Ok so its not true 4k - but who cares its way better than 1080p, I'm unsure if its 1440 upscaled to 1800 by checkerboarding (which I think it is) 4k will literally fry my brain if that materializes.

First light is brilliant by the way and Fetch is a great character. I highly recommend it.

@themcnoisy: You want to try Rise of the Tomb Raider! That game looked great on the XB1 so should be great on the PS4 but on the Pro in its 4k mode, its simply stunning. Its not 'true' or full 4k but it is imperceptibly close to it. DF rated this as one of the best '4k' games available on the Pro.

I do want First Light and think it will look stunning in HDR too but I can't justify the £15-20 it seems to be costing at the moment. I bought R&C for £13. I believe its around 4-5hours in length too. I will pick it up at some point but not financially in a place to pay that much for a few hours worth.

@BAMozzy: I guess you didn't grab First Light when it was part of the IGC? Was Jan 2015 according to wikipedia.

@Mega-Gazz: I did! Great game, drug addled super heroes are the way forward.

You got me, now I'm re-downloading Second Son, though I'm still on a 1080p TV with my pro. FFXV first

@Mega-Gazz: MG you need a 4k tv bro. I bought a Phillips one for £400. Its brilliant for the price but you need to play around with the settings to get the colours and stuff right. Its got hdr but for some reason my pro messes that up and I get crazy delay. So ive turned hdr off. But well worth it for the increased resolution and its got better input latency than my old 1080p tv. Winner.

I'm waiting to see if 10 bit panels are cheaper in 2017, because my current tv is 60" and I won't go smaller, which puts the price of a ks8000 (North American numbering, the lowest Samsung 10 bit panel) at over 3000$ on sale. Plus of course wall mounting.

@Mega-Gazz: No idea what 10bit panelling is, if that's for HDR fair enough. But for me getting rid of aliasing is the bug pull, higher resolution means no more perceivable jagged edges and mad blinking objects which is true next gen stuff in my opinion. It all seems a bit pompus and silly talking about this as something like infamous looked good anyway - and I've never been a graphics Hoare and stayed away from these type of discussions. I always considered a stable frame rate king. But I was slightly wrong and higher res gaming is bloomin brilliant!

My reasoning for initially wanting a pro was due to the bigger hdd and new lower latency pad for Rocket League - both of which I was going to buy anyway for PS4 scrubs. The 4k / hdr / upscaling / improved psvr were just future proofing in my eyes, just in case I ever felt the urge to splurge on a new set up. So my wife got it for xmas for me as a present as she wouldn't let me buy it for myself. Also my TV was only upgraded in the last few weeks when the screen on my 1080p TV died, I had zero motivation to upgrade at the time, but I shot around to Argos as I couldnt play FF15 in the living room and It had only just been delivered and boom this 4k Phillips TV was on offer which had garnered better reviews than the LG and Bush cheap 4k TVs.

I'm so glad my hand was forced due to the TV breaking, I read a few websites including digital foundry and was worried about lag, brightness, nits and all this other stuff. I needn't had worried as the Phillips is fine for what I needed and better than I expected.

Good to hear that it works great. I'm most hyped for HDR, hence the focus on 10 bit panels... we'll see. If it was 500$ I'd do it but at $3500 it's not that appetizing.

@Mega-Gazz: I didn't get my PS4 until the following month and so hadn't needed (or wanted) PS+ until then so missed it. I have the 55KS8000 (KS9000 in the US) and would certainly recommend it. Its great for gaming and HDR looks stunning. Just finished my first run through Ratchet and Clank in HDR and that game looked great. Maybe not the 'best' HDR I have seen but certainly looks stunning. I believe the KS7000 (or 8000 in the US) is the 'cheapest' HDR10 certified TV. Sony's 930/950 just manages to meet the minimum specs but didn't submit this for accreditation but its the cheapest HDR10 standard TV from Sony - the only other in their range is the ZD9. I don't think you have Panasonic in the US otherwise the DX902 is their only HDR10. LG's HDR10 range are all OLEDs. These are nowhere near as bright though (at around 600nits) but that's enough for HDR10 standards with OLED technology.

@themcnoisy: 10bit panels are not just for HDR although HDR does stipulate that 10bit is a requirement. 10bit refers to the amount of colours a TV has. With 8bit, each colour is made up of a value of Red, Green and/or Blue between 0 and 256 - given you 16million colours essentially. With 10bit though, colours can have a value of 0 to 1024 giving over 1billion colours. With 8bit, you can see banding in gradients (depending on how well its mastered, you may not with a well calibrated screen) but with 10bit, colour banding is reduced. In case you don't know what colour banding is - its the 'stripey' look of gradients where it looks like bands of colour instead of a smooth gradient.

A lot of TVs use '10bit dithering' to reduce banding. This essentially flashes up two colours very fast to create the 'inbetween' colour to smooth out the gradients but a true 10bit TV displays these colours.

HDR10 also uses a wider colour gamut. With standard TV's, they use the REC709 colour gamut. This can be represented by a Triangle with Red, Green and Blue at the corners and White in the middle. A Wider Colour Gamut is a bigger triangle. Colour also has luminescence (brightness) too and with HDR this is greatly increased. Instead of being between 0 and 100nits, HDR10 is between 0 and at least 1000nits (Sony's ZD9 is the brightest commercially available TV at around 1800nits, the KS series is around 1450-1500nits). Some HDR content is mastered to 4000nits - although these professional monitors for viewing content at that brightness need to be watercooled at the moment. This means that HDR offers a much greater volume of colours. Think of a Toblerone where the triangle is the colour gamut and the length is the luminescence. HDR is a bigger triangle with a much longer length and so the 'volume' inside is much greater.

This is what HDR offers but you can still benefit from a 10bit panel with Standard TV's. The trouble is though that virtually all Standard range content is 8bit anyway and 'banding' is removed or minimised at the editing stage. Games though can use 10bit colours in a Standard Dynamic Range.

Anyway hope that helps explain what all this means...

@BAMozzy: I've got a UN60H7150AF right now, and do really like it, so upgrading to another Samsung is the natural choice... As I said though, at 60" its like $3000+ so I'm hoping next year's models offer a cheaper 10 bit panel.

Also, apparently Final Fantasy has a great HDR implementation.

@kyleforrester87: @Splat: @BAMozzy: @Mega-Gazz: @ztpayne7: @Gamer83: @get2sammyb: Thanks for joining in this thread the last week or so, I'm just going to wrap it up! I'm so glad I bought a higher resolution TV, the ps4 pro and then getting to play infamous second son, it may not be the best game ever (angels wtf?) yet its loads of fun and full of character. I'm about 70% through Second son and to me it really is next gen gaming from a graphics and effects standpoint. Aliasing is completely removed bar the very odd instance and the immersion from the clear often complex imagery at near to 60fps just sucks you in.

I think the likes of digital foundry do the ps4 pro a disservice as they have mega PCs at their disposal. I've read their articles and although the points may be fair to them, as someone who's never gamed over 1080p its flipping fantastic and the articles dont represent what Im seeing and playing. At the cheapish price for a pro and the fact you can trade your ps4 scrubs in for over a third of the asking price its a mid gen miracle. Bring on Ratchet and Clank!

@themcnoisy: Actually I think the Digital Foundry do the PS4 Pro a lot of Justice. They are very fair in analysing what you get and just how well it stacks up to a very high end PC. A lot of the times they state clearly that the difference is generally only noticeable at very close distance - not the distance we are most likely to sit when gaming. Unfortunately though its the comments and ignorant people on the internet that are the ones that are bashing the PS4 Pro. They are the ones who are criticising the console for not delivering a full 4k in a lot of games - even though the Pro delivers a higher resolution than a lot of PC gamers use (1440p or less), they are the ones who are criticising the fact that developers are opting to improve visuals over frame rates.

Digital Foundry at most are critical of the developers who fail to deliver on the mandate that games must have at least the same if not better frame rates so games like Last of Us in 60fps mode failed on this but has subsequently been patched. More often than not though, their analysis is positive and in some cases have helped gamers in how to get the best performance out of the Pro - for example how to get a virtually locked 30fps in the last guardian (by forcing the Pro into 1080p mode before starting the game).

I think its great that they look at what has been improved - whether its just a resolution increase, whether their is addition improvements to things like Shadows, textures, draw distances etc and by how much, how the frame rate compares overall etc. The fact they may have a High end PC to compare, only helps them to give us information. They can tweak the PC's settings to see what level of shadows etc match so know what settings have been improved and which have been kept the same as the standard version.

This is the issue - I like DF articles, but they compare to high end stuff that most people wouldn't have, like how Tom's Hardware compares the highest end video cards. Context is a little blurred if you don't know how to filter what they say.... but they are accurate and detailed and relatively unbiased aside from the bias towards high end stuff.

@Mega-Gazz: Its difficult to compare with a standard PS4 or Xbox One for example as neither of these can offer over 1080p. What they are doing is showing how well a £350 console (inc a controller and cables) compares to PC with a GPU that costs a lot more on its own, more RAM etc that delivers full 4k and still state that its 'very' close to giving the full 4k experience. Its hardly setting the PS4 Pro in bad light that a £350 console compares quite favourably to a High End PC - at least visually anyway. How else do you expect them to compare a 4k game? How else do you expect them to be able to work out what settings have been increased and to what level? They can check by changing the settings on their PC and seeing which matches closest.

Maybe most of us won't ever own a PC as 'high' end as they have - at least not for a few years until that becomes the 'norm' but I see it as a good thing that they have to use a high end PC to compare and then the difference visually isn't that much. If anything it shows how much the Pro has achieved with a relatively low budget.

Agree regarding DF, they seem to work to provide unbiased clarity while other sites generally offer comparatively poorer comparisons and analysis simply because the writers don't have the technical knowedge or the necessary equipment to get the job done. DF do good work.