PS4 Pro launches this week. The new console packs significantly more power than the standard PS4 and is aimed at 4K gaming. When it comes to PSVR, which is limited by its 1080p screen, the biggest gains we’re seeing so far are in loading times.

Right now you’d be hard pressed in most cases to tell the difference between a PSVR game played on PS4 Pro and the same game played on PS4. We think that will probably change and PlayStation VR games will see big visual improvements over time as developers begin to target the PS4 Pro and unlock the capabilities of its hardware. In the meantime, there’s one instant perk you’re likely to notice when playing PlayStation VR on the PS4 Pro and that’s loading times.

See Graphics Side-by-side in Our Full PSVR on PS4 Pro vs. PS4 Comparison

In our initial tests, we’ve seen loading times improved significantly for PSVR games played on the PS4 Pro compared to the PS4. In Robinson: The Journey, we measured a 24% reduction in loading speed when launching a new campaign.

That’s a benefit that’s likely due to faster memory and read speeds on the PS4 Pro, and one that will be seen across the board for anything played on the Pro (VR or not), but PSVR players are likely to get a slightly greater benefit out of it. Here’s why:

Faster memory on PS4 Pro doesn’t just mean shorter times between loading screens, it also means faster texture loading. Many games use a level-of-detail system that loads low-resolution textures for distant objects; as you approach, higher resolution textures are loaded on the fly, giving you a sharper view. If the system doesn’t load these fast enough, you’ll see a ‘texture pop’ where the ugly low-res texture suddenly pops into full detail. It’s an ugly and distracting affair, and it happens to varying degrees depending upon the game in question and other things happening with your system (like background tasks).

playstation-4-pro-playstation-vr-psvr-8In VR, when the gameplay is slower and the player has the option to get extremely close to objects (even picking them up and inspecting them by hand), those high-res textures are even more important. In a traditional FPS you’re probably sprinting down a hallway blasting guns at 50 enemies; it doesn’t matter much if a detail on the wall doesn’t load quickly as you zip by. But in VR, you’re often moving more slowly and you might actually want to stop and look up close at the world around you (especially when there’s small text to be read); texture pops are a distracting reminder that you’re not actually in the virtual world that’s being presented to your eyes and ears.

SEE ALSO
PlayStation Pro Launch Brings 13 Confirmed PSVR Enhanced Games

Thankfully, PS4 Pro’s increased loading speeds not only helps whisk us from one virtual scene to the next, but also makes things slightly more immersive by reducing texture pops and loading high-res textures more quickly when we stop to smell the roses. That’s fine for now, but we’re excited to see how far developers will be able to push PlayStation VR games once they tap into the system’s extra power.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • DiGiCT Ltd

    Thats very logical as it is faster memory as the old one.
    Same happened for me from a GTX 970 to a GTX 1070, huge speed upgrade on loading, although a lot of other features also improved but the loading was the first thing i recognized immediately/

    • Graham J ⭐️

      That’s surprising. Disk transfer speeds (even SSD) are nowhere near memory or bus speeds. Maybe software is using the GPU for asset decompression?

      • DiGiCT Ltd

        Yes i think it has indeedto do with compression decompressions.
        Or maybe its just spwapping textures between main memory and video memory as video memoty in genral is smaller as the main system memory.
        Not totally went into this deeper but i only can say it realy boosten my loading times almost double as fast.
        My config I7 CPU, 16 GB memory and a GTX 1070 with 8 GB memory, the olg gtx 970 had noly 4 gb of memory.
        Although i could try to find out the detail on exectly it would happen, but im ok already with the results lol, no time to go deeper analyzing atm.

        • Graham J ⭐️

          Fair enough, just thinking out loud :) I have a 970 so it’s nice to hear an upgrade may do more than increase my frame rate.

          • Jim Cherry

            for once nvidia did a good job of jumping up performance from one generation to the other with the 1070 and 1080. To bad they chose to raise the average sell price of the cards aswell.

          • Graham J ⭐️

            I think a lot of it is node side and RAM speed but yep, certainly much faster cards.

          • J.C.

            They only did this because they knew AMD had nothing capable of competing. I don’t like it either, but only competition is going to bring the costs down.

          • DiGiCT Ltd

            Yes it will , i did not regret it, 10x series are way smoother.
            I did not go for 1060 as its the lowest one, besides that it also has no sli, the 1070 is middle of them and has sli support, that makes it possible to later add a second one when the prices dropping, as Nvidia is working on SLI support for VR.
            Each screen its own GPU for sure will let you be able to play all in very high detail.

            I am not sure I eventualy will do the sli but at least i have the option later on ;-)

    • OgreTactics

      Also the 10XX series (higher-end) has GDDR5X, slightly faster bandwidth/buffer than GDDR5.

      • Cooe

        Only the 1080 and Pascal Titan X have GDDR5X. The rest of the line has regular old GDDR5. And game load speeds are going to be much much much more affected by primary storage speed (HD/SSD) being far and away the bottleneck in that situation than secondary storage (system RAM) and least of all the GPU’s VRAM.

  • VR Zone BKK

    My guess is that the loading time and access time, let’s call it “read time” and “write time” is also relating to the change of interface from sata II to sata III and appropriate HDDs not only the memory.

    SATA II (revision 2.x) interface, formally known as SATA 3Gb/s, is a second generation SATA interface running at 3.0 Gb/s. The bandwidth throughput, which is supported by the interface, is up to 300MB/s.

    SATA III (revision 3.x) interface, formally known as SATA 6Gb/s, is a third generation SATA interface running at 6.0Gb/s. The bandwidth throughput, which is supported by the interface, is up to 600MB/s. This interface is backwards compatible with SATA 3 Gb/s interface.

    • Lamanuwa

      I think it’s due to memory bandwidth and Delta color compression for the most part and everything else like faster CPU and interfaces will also help.

      Geometry and textures can be loaded onto memory faster because of the higher bandwidth and efficiency.

  • Nein

    $400 console upgrade for 10 seconds (according to your video [40/50 sec loading]) is terrible value. Combined with few graphical improvements, these glorified ‘4K’ boxes are a cop-out.

    Hell, I think these upgraded consoles are just Sony’s pathetic attempt at trying to keep up with graphics. And quiet frankly, screwing developers in the process. Nevermind that developers now have to optimize for 2 sets of hardware. Nevermind the costs associated with more staff in the engine team, QA team, and release team. Nevermind having to completely alter game-design principles (start with a bad looking game and upgrade? Or start with a good looking game and downgrade?). The fact that all of this is so Sony can go up 1 in the graphical settings under the facade that it can play 4K games, is just another self-flagellating decision in the industry.

    • Mako

      it is significantly better, you just cant tell from youtube videos. when you see it for yourself, after facepalming, youll understand.

      • Jim Cherry

        still not worth 400 unless you have a tv that does hdr
        Also if you have a ps4 already find a way to sell it for as much as possible thus bringing the price of upgrade to around 200 or less.

        • Mako

          you’d be surprised, I never saw any PS4 in person gameplay until recently, played mostly 3ds this gen until ps4 pro launch(haven’t touched 3ds since mostly) so I only saw ps4 pro for months. when I saw my brothers regular ps4, I was like “wow” what a difference just in uncharted 4

    • David Herrington

      You’re right about the $400 upgrade being a waste if loading times are the only advantage the PS4 pro has, but I assume there are lots of game makers that will create games in the near future that specifically cater to the PS4 pro’s extra horsepower, and that will look much different from original PS4 games. Only time will tell.

  • Mako

    like the new 3ds xl, a slight bump in cpu power but running the same apps, can make a HUGE difference. so excited for tomorrow!

    • David Herrington

      Sorry, I guess I don’t understand what you mean by “HUGE difference.” Can you elaborate on this?

      • Mako

        When you try to open the E shop on the original 3DS it takes over a minute. When you open it on the new 3DS it takes under 25 seconds. It’s just faster

        • David Herrington

          That sounds great if your performance was bad before, but what about PS4 owners who didn’t have any issues yet with load times and such. I foresee Sony releasing a new version of their operating system that will still work great on PSpro but will cause major slow down for any PS4 owners, basically FORCING any PS4 owners to either upgrade or suffer. This happens all the time with phone makers who release a new phone every year and is called “planned obsolescence.”

          Remember how well your PS4’s work right now because they’re about to get nerfed.

          • Mako

            thats not what happened at all. the games will run the same on both systems, in standard mode. people have the option to enhance with the ps4 pro.
            loading times are way better on ps4 then an old handheld nintendo device, it was an(bad-ish) example. ps4 doesnt suffer at all to begin with, so ps4 pro owners will benefit, while existing ps4 owners lose nothing but also gain nothing.
            say skyrim takes 15 seconds to load on standard ps4… itll take 5-8 seconds on ps4 pro, but will run the same otherwise, unless enhanced mode activated, which pro owners paid a premium for.

      • Mako

        load times are way faster. youtube(in browser) can do 3d playback, shop loads in 20 seconds(old 3d took way longer, idk exactly). mii verse, again load speed – they’re sometimes 2-3x faster on new 3ds vs old.

  • macish79

    Have you testes VR Worlds yet with the PRO? It got updated shortly after release.

    • Torreth

      I have, and the difference is far to small to be noticed, and this is why. The position of VR on your head needs to be “Just Right” for the games to look perfect. Just a little tap on either side could result in blurriness. The Pro doesnt do much to VR games except make the lines a little less jagged, and when I say “LITTLE”, i mean little. Every PSVR owner with the launch model PS4 can see the same amount of improvement by simply making sure the headset is on correctly. Dont get me wrong. I love my Pro, but I dont love it in the sense that it has earned my love. I love its potential future, but not its present condition. It was hard for me to deal with transferring all my data to the Pro from my launch PS4. After the process is completed, it automatically deactivates your prior console, and the lights go out. I was extremely poor when I saved up for months to buy the original on launch day model, and was proud I made the sacrifices to buy it. The lack of improvement is distressing to me from VR games, and Standard games. I may make more money now, but this thing hasnt earned its keep yet.

  • Graham J ⭐️

    Just so you know, your survey popup makes it impossible to comment from an iPad. As soon as you tap the input box it covers the entire page with black.

  • D2S

    Most likey it comes from the increased CPU Speed. SATA2 is fast enough for the 5200 rpm HDD so not much is gained from the faster SATA3 Speed

    • Graham J ⭐️

      What’s it doing though? Decompression maybe? Moving data from disk to RAM is mainly handled by the chipset.

      • D2S

        I’m sure, that a lot of calculations have to be done during the initial loading of a game. Setting up the engine and stuff like that.
        Why should memory speed matter, if it is already 1000x faster (178GB/s) than the read speed of the HDD (100MB/s)?
        Sure, the faster Memory will help, but the main bottleneck was always the CPU speed.

        • Jim Cherry

          there’s also 512 MBs more vram available to games which could help in regards to draw distance

  • ZenInsight

    Unless the graphics are a major jump, the only facepalm I will be doing is when thinking about people that cared so much about 4k that they paid for this.

    (Hint: graphics are not a major jump)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BWByrSGmDc

    But, if the Ps4pro had a built in Blu-ray HDR 4K player …well then. But does it? No.

    Ps4 was mainly made to get $k output, with no 4k player to make up for some lower framerates on the VR headset. And I’m not even sure that has worked out very well. For an industry leader, this is a very strange move.

    • ZenInsight

      I would like to see a ground up built PS4 pro game…that is so much more impressive. Otherwise, I would just wait until the next round.

      • Jim Cherry

        ground up ps4 pro will hopefully show sooner than ground floor ps4 games. otherwise we’ll be waiting till 2018 for last of us 2 ;}

  • OgreTactics

    Agree with the general sentiment that PS4 Pro/Slim are failed update, so much that they don’t make sense (like the recent Macbook updates).

    In fact, while updating during cycle is great and logical, further fragmenting their line into Pro/Slim/Classic is a the beginning of a very messy line management.

    Save for the fact none of the updates are enticing, be it in terms of design, size, upgraded I/O standards, lack of UHD-blu-ray and not new components or functionality. There’s actually very little point in buying a PS4 Pro, let alone a Slim.

  • D2S

    I’m still waiting for the Pro Patch of Rush of Blood. Wasn’t it supposed to be available on the PS4 Pro launch day?
    Does anyone know when it will be out?