TL;DW:
- Many enhanced games are getting raytracing when they were using simpler lighting solutions previously
- A surprising handful of games are getting 8K modes, though the 8K usually turns off other enhancements like raytracing. They mentioned GT7 and F1 2024 as two examples.
- Most enhanced games are focusing on creating a “Performance Pro” mode, which more-or-less gives you the previous quality mode, but at 60fps. Some devs are planning on adding a “Quality Pro” mode that turns on even more features at the cost of FPS.
- Most enhanced games are using PSSR to upscale from 1080-1440p to 4K.
- PSSR seems to be better than FSR, but still a little worse than DLSS. Oliver noted a few cases of image breakup and ghosting around the edges.
- Horizon: FW is not using PSSR, but somehow it seems to be the best-looking of all the enhanced games (in Oliver’s opinion).
- FF7R is dramatically improved image quality wise - previously, performance mode was real fuzzy.
- Dragon’s Dogma 2 is getting about ~50 FPS in the troublesome city scenes, but this is with RTGI turned on so that’s pretty impressive.
We all expected that to be the case, it turns out it isn’t complete BS! But 8K TVs are currently outrageously expensive, and so most people don’t have them. Additionally, it sounds like the number of games that support 8K will be only a fraction of all the games that get PS5 Pro updates. Gran Turismo and F1 2024 are the only ones I saw called out in the video. They might have mentioned more, but I skipped around.
I wouldn’t call €1300 (cheapest 8K TV where I’m living) outrageously expensive. You can easily spend this much on a 4K TV without straying into true high-end territory.
I remember when the first “mass market” flat screen TVs came about around in the late '90s. The earliest one I saw with my own eyes was still years away from HD, hardly even flat by modern standards (I think it was a plasma TV), but cost a cool 20 grand. The store had it behind a small fence so that people wouldn’t accidentally damage it. I was not impressed by the image quality and it was actually smaller than the largest CRT TVs I had seen. Maybe 30" at best.
Either way, even with a handful of games now supporting real or upscaled 8K, the issue of a lack of content remains. Streaming services rarely support it beyond the odd demo video on YouTube and even if they did, they are hardly what you go for if you want good image quality, given how mercilessly they compress their content to save on bandwidth costs. There’s no 8K Blu-Ray yet and there might not ever be one. By the time there is a decent amount of 8K content available, the current lineup of 8K TVs will be hopelessly outdated and likely not even support future standards.
Really the most useful application for these I can think of right now is showing photos in all of their glory to bored relatives and friends. 8K is slightly more than 33 megapixels, after all, whereas 4K is just over 8 megapixels. Landscape photography in particular benefits a lot from being seen at higher resolutions.
You make a fair point, that is a surprisingly accessible price. I could see a small audience of Gran Turismo freaks buying 8K TVs and PS5 Pros solely for that game. Though now that I say that, I feel like they are all satisfied already with PSVR2 🤔