Digital Foundry: Select PS4 games are performing worse on PS4 Pro

By Gabe Gurwin November 11, 2016

The Last of Us Remastered PS4 Pro vs PS4 Gameplay Frame-Rate Test

The PlayStation 4 Pro promises to greatly enhance your existing PlayStation 4 library with higher resolutions, better frame rates, and more intricate visual effects, but a select group of titles appear to actually run slightly worse on the new hardware.

Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry reported that several games, including new releases The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Special Edition and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, saw lower frame rates and other visual problems on PlayStation 4 Pro, even when running the games on a standard 1080p television.

The Last of Us: Remastered, which still features both 30-frames-per-second and 60-frames-per-second options, has encountered issues across both modes. The 60fps option now routinely will drop by about five or six frames per second.

The 30 frames per second mode won’t feature as many general performance issues, but other, more unusual problems have been recorded. Industry insider “Shinbo602” posted videos of water textures turning to bright white splotches on the ground, but the problem seems to be rectified by switching to the higher-frame-rate option.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided saw similar issues. It isn’t exactly a technical powerhouse on standard hardware, and Digital Foundry found that frame rate drops were just as frequent during the game’s first mission on PlayStation 4 Pro, occasionally dropping as low as 20 frames per second. Later parts of the game do run better with the PlayStation 4 Pro, however, with smoother performance and less screen tearing. As Mankind Divided was one game that can cause headaches due to its frame drops, particularly in the “hub” areas, we’re hoping Square Enix and Eidos Montreal can get the game performing as it should.

While we aren’t thrilled about the console’s lack of a 4K Blu-ray player and finicky HDR support, we still really like the PlayStation 4 Pro. For $400, however, these issues really should have been ironed out.

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Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…

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