Topic: Someone Explains this to me

O.k during today's conference Sony tried multiple times to show how much better games will look at 4K with HDR in some instances they even compare with the regular PS4 images... and yes... I could see how much better the games look on PS4 Pro.... problem is.. I'm watching in my laptop which does not have 4k and does not have HDR.... so how come... I was able to see those better textures and lighting effects that they were talking about when you should not be able to see them on a regular display.... were they screwing the regular PS4 images on purpose so the other ones would look better even on regular displays? or what exactly is the optical trick here...

@DualWielding: The same way a 1080p screenshot looks WAY better if you make it half the size. Also, some of the games shown like Horizon and Call of Duty clearly had massively enhanced lighting and particle effects.

@get2sammyb: o.k but if i get the PS4 and use it on my 1080p would I get those improvements?

@DualWielding: @get2sammyb: I feel like that it is not true 4k but really good 4k scaling so I think that the devs will use the juice power to upgrade textures and stuff and then it just scales it up to 4k

@DualWielding: According to Digital Foundry Rise of the Tomb Raider will allow you to select different modes. In one mode (1080p) you get a lot of visual enhancements - higher quality shadows, textures, lighting, particle effects etc. According to the leaked information beforehand, although its yet to be confirmed, no PS4 Pro enabled game will be less than 1080p. Battlefield 1 (for example as it was mentioned during the briefing) will be 900p on the PS4 but at least 1080p on the 'Pro'. No doubt the frame rate will also be 'smoother' too.

The Pro will know whether you are connected to a 1080p, 4k or 4k HDR TV and pick the best optimisation for you. (From Digital Foundry) Rise of the Tomb Raider has three different modes in the PS4 Pro version only: a 4K30 presentation with HDR support that strikes an impressive balance between visual features and resolution, a 1080p30 mode that ramps up quality settings to the max and an unlocked frame-rate mode for 1080p that sees performance vary between 40-60fps (we assume that this will be down to CPU bottlenecks), rather like Tomb Raider Definitive Edition on the standard PlayStation 4.

The reason games look better is that you are seeing a 4k version downsampled to 1080p or in some cases, games with better visual effects (lighting, particles etc). A lot of 'console' games are optimised by scaling down the resolution and scaling back the visual effects (lighting, shadows, reflections etc) to often very low levels to run at a 'target' resolution. I watched a DF video looking at Star Wars:BF and comparing the PS4 version to the 'potential' PS4 'Neo' as it was then specs to see if the hardware could do 4k. With this, they compared the frame rate of the game running at different resolutions with the same quality of visual effects. Interestingly though they showed the game running at 1080p with all the visual effects turned up to maximum and this was by far the most impressive looking version (although I was watching on a 1080p screen). So much more depth to the picture but interestingly enough, the frame rate was 'slightly' lower than the 1080p PS4 spec version. That shows how much 'horse-power' is needed to generate all those extra visual effects. If games are offering an 'enhanced' 1080p version then yes you will definitely see a marked improvement