PS4 Pro Bandwidth is Potential Bottleneck for 4K But A Thought-Through Tradeoff – Little Nightmares Dev

With more and more developers looking to hop aboard the 4K train, especially with the release of Sony’s PS4 Pro, there’s been plenty of talk about the limits of the console in achieving a 4K standard. GamingBolt spoke to Tarsier Studios’ Dave Mervik, who’s currently working on Little Nightmares for PS4, Xbox One and PC. Sony increased memory bandwidth on the PS4 Pro but maintained largely the same overall RAM as the base PS4 (except a certain amount being freed up for devs). Could this become a bottleneck down the line for 4K development?

Mervik noted that, “The bandwidth is a potential issue, especially when running 4k, but it’s probably a thought-through tradeoff that they found necessary to make.” That trade-off is especially apparent when the PS4 Pro has double the GPU power of the PS4. “The extra GPU power is necessary for running games at 30 fps or higher in 4k. That’s probably the goal that Sony had in mind for the games released for the Pro,” Tarsier told us.

Given that most games don’t run at native 4K on the PS4 Pro and developers using custom techniques such as checkerboard 4K rendering, it’s safe to assume that the Pro was Sony’s first big push towards 4K gaming. Next year, the Xbox Scorpio will (most likely) be the only console that will push the medium towards native 4K in AAA modern games, Microsoft claims.

But what are your thoughts on the PS4 Pro and its success in improving visuals for games? Let us know below.