Have you ever wondered exactly much effort goes into optimizing a game for the PlayStation 4 Pro? For that matter, is it possible that a developer could offer some benefit to the PS4 Pro version of a game that isn’t on other platforms? Granted, this varies from developer to developer but it was still interesting to speak to World of Tanks technical director Chris McCue for his thoughts on these questions.
We know that the PS4 Pro offers a higher resolution for PS4 titles but what other improvements were seen, especially when it comes to World of Tanks? McCue noted that, “Although the primary visual improvement for the PS4 Pro was the resolution increase, we made additional changes to improve shadow quality, ambient occlusion, and level of detail. In addition, for those players who have a PS4 Pro without a 4K television, we use the extra GPU power to improve our antialiasing at 1080p.”
McCue did confirm that there’s no direct comparison between the PC and PS4 Pro versions. “World of Tanks PC is developed independently from World of Tanks console, so there’s no direct comparison between the two. When comparing the PS4 Pro version to the base PS4, though, we’ve kept the differences strictly to the visual improvements described above because it’s important to us to maintain a consistent user experience. There are no new features that only exist on the PS4 Pro.”
PS4 Pro lead engineer Mark Cerny stated quite a while back that the overall effort to convert a PS4 title to PS4 Pro was roughly 0.2 to 0.3 percent of overall effort. Of course, since that depends on the developer and the resources available, we asked McCue if more work was needed than that.
He replied that, “It’s nearly impossible to measure some piece of work as a percentage of the overall effort of developing an entire game, so I don’t think we can speak to the accuracy of those numbers. The level of effort required was what we would consider reasonable for a new hardware platform, though.”
At the end of the day, the PS4 Pro is still a fairly powerful console but it’s obviously not the next big leap for the brand. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter even predicted that it will become the base PS4 model in the next few years with the PlayStation 5 bringing true native 4K to the forefront. What are your thoughts on the PS4 Pro and the amount of effort to optimize PS4 titles for it? Let us know in the comments below.