Virtual Reality is now… a reality! Apart from issues shipping the things out to their anxiously awaiting fans, the Oculus Rift CV1 and the HTC Vive are now in the hands of consumers ready to experience the closest thing we have to the Matrix. Or Sword Art Online. I am one of those fans, having been in possession of a HTC Vive for a few weeks now and can give my thoughts on preparing for VR and using VR. Prior to getting the Vive I was upgrading my PC, not only in preparation for the Vive but also to play games at higher settings with smoother frame rates.
I am in the market for a PlayStation 4. With the upcoming release of Persona 5, Gravity Rush 2, Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian, there is finally a number of games that are not available on the PC that I would like to play. So it is quite fortuitous that Sony announced two new models of the PlayStation 4, the Slim and the Pro. The Slim is the unsurprising smaller and more efficient second rendition of the base PS4, while the Pro represents a new change in the console hardware lifecycle that was previously only seen in Nintendo’s handhelds, namely the New 3DS. The PS4 Pro promises greater graphical power, allowing it to support output to 4K televisions, but also to improve graphical quality and/or framerate at 1080p. The Sony conference also spoke at length about support for HDR-capable televisions, but through firmware updates every PS4 model will support HDR.
If you have a 4K television, it would be an easy decision to upgrade to the Pro (though for some inexplicable reason the PS4 Pro does not support Ultra 4K Blurays, the Xbox One S does though). So for the rest of us, the decision is whether to get the Slim (or stay with the base model), or get/upgrade to the Pro. (As a side note, if you already have a base model PS4, the only reason to upgrade to the Slim is the addition of support for 5GHz wifi and the ac wifi standard.) Here I’ll give a brief overview of the changes the Pro brings over the base/Slim models and some of the other stuff talked about in relation to the Pro.
