Has PlayStation 4 Pro managed to live up to its marketing? By and large, yes. At its best, it is capable of producing compelling results at native 4K. Stack up Rise of the Tomb Raider on Pro against an ultra high-end PC and run them side-by-side and you'll see that most of the 4K clarity is there, much of the detail is there and frame-rate remains the clearest differentiating factor. But the fact that a £350/$399 box is capable of even competing is a remarkable achievement.
It's clear that the key technologies are in place to ensure that PS4 Pro can work very nicely in the 4K world, but launch software shows that the transition isn't going to be entirely smooth. Many titles are operating at resolutions much closer to 1440p - a pixel-count we'd previously established as a better fit for the core hardware based on established rendering techniques. The fact that Uncharted 4 doesn't reach 4K or even 1800p isn't a great turn-out bearing in mind how the Pro is marketed and the title's status as the flagship PlayStation 4 technology showcase. The thing is though, that it still looks really nice - modern rendering techniques are making the seemingly definitive link between pixel count and image quality much more of a grey area.
We expect Pro implementations to improve over time, and the first party Sony titles we've seen in the pipeline (Horizon Zero Dawn, Days Gone) looks simply sensational, but it may be some time before developers fully get to grips with the new hardware. But on the flipside, even in the here and now, even with so many different high resolution mode variations in the titles we've looked at so far, the bottom line is clear. Not much more money is buying a whole lot more power.
If you don't already own a PlayStation console and you're looking to invest, the Pro is a no-brainer. You're getting over twice the GPU power, a faster CPU, future-proofed display and streaming media support - and twice the hard drive space. The price-point is keen enough that it's going to take some seriously aggressive bundling deals to make the standard PlayStation 4 look appealing.
But if you already own a PS4, the choice of whether to upgrade is a tricky one. There are no system exclusives, the library is the same, and existing games will only run better if developers go back and patch them. If you own a 4K screen or are considering a purchase, the upgrade will be highly worthwhile, but what's clear is that there's little here likely to make your existing console obsolete. With an installed base rapidly approaching 50m users, that's probably a very good thing. But with that said, if you read Digital Foundry, if you appreciate image quality and performance as we do, it's really difficult to overlook the fact that there's a system out there that's better than what you have now - and if more titles follow the approach to enhancement seen in the likes of Rise of the Tomb Raider, PlayStation 4 Pro becomes an essential purchase.
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