When PlayStation 4 Pro launches on November 10, it won’t bring any immediate changes to PlayStation VR. Instead, as Mark Cerny told The Verge, it’s up to developers to take advantage of the PS4 Pro’s extra power – something that’s completely optional.
“We?re just asking for them to take advantage,” he added. “We?d like for them to take a look at what the hardware can do and do something with it.”
Speaking with Eurogamer about what PS4 Pro could bring to PSVR, Cerny revealed that there’s advanced multi-resolution support for increased performance in VR titles, allowing games to have the edges rendered at a lower resolution. As Eurogamer explained, this means “there’ll be a big boost to performance with no noticeable impact to image quality in the HMD [head-mounted display].” The PS4 Pro has a GPU that can offer 4.2 teraflops of power (2.28 times more than the standard PS4), but instead of adding new architecture to the console, Sony “doubled the GPU size by essentially placing it next to a mirrored image of itself, rather like the wings of a butterfly.” As Cerny added in his conversation with Gamasutra, doubling the GPU size “gives us an extremely clean way to support the 700 existing [PS4] titles, because we can turn off half the GPU and just run something that’s very close to the original GPU.”
While every PS4 game will play smoothly on PS4 Pro, developers can...