Author: Kyle Orland

Enlarge / Depending on your display, this Sony-provided image might not do the added graphical effects of the PS4 justice.

In introducing the PS4 Pro yesterday, Sony compared the addition of 4K resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) to the jump from standard definition to high definition that took place in consoles a decade ago. After seeing the Pro demonstrated in person after Sony's announcement event last night, however, I can't say the jump in graphical fidelity is really comparable to that SD-to-HD leap.

At its base, the PS4 Pro is just a more graphically powerful version of the standard PS4. The new unit's AMD GPU is capable of 4.2 teraflops, Sony says, compared to 1.84 teraflops on the standard model. That would seem to put the Pro somewhere between AMD's recently launched Radeon RX 470 and 480 PC graphics cards in terms of raw graphical processing power (though differences in PC and console architecture make that something of an apples-to-oranges comparison). The PS4 Pro also sports unspecified improvements to the CPU clockspeed and memory bandwidth over the standard model.

To be clear, there's no single set of standard improvements that you'll always see in a PS4 game running in "Pro mode." Developers have a lot of freedom in how they take advantage of the improved hardware specs to alter the look of their games. As long as Pro Mode looks better than standard mode (while not running at a worse frame rate), it's fine by Sony.

Before I go off to try out the new HDR and 4K gaming capabilities of the just-announced PlayStation 4 Pro, we at Ars thought you might want to see the hardware itself that is being shown off here at the PlayStation Theater. Here's a quick gallery of the new box that will be sitting underneath many of your entertainment centers this November—if you're willing to shell out $400, that is.

Click through for a good look at the width and height of the new hardware compared to other systems, along with a surprise refresh of the PlayStation Camera, which is now more cylindrical and less like Short Circuit's Jonny 5.

Sony announced a successor to the PlayStation 4 today, but it's not intended to replace the console launched back in 2013. Instead, the PlayStation 4 Pro is an upgraded tier of console that is designed to play the same games as the existing PS4 at a higher fidelity—meaning, with 4K resolutions and HDR (high dynamic range).

Confirming rumors first reported back in March, the Pro sports an improved CPU, GPU, and greater memory bandwidth than its predecessors, and it will ship on November 10, priced at $399. Sony's Mark Cerny confirmed a 1TB hard drive will ship in all PS4 Pro consoles, which looks much like the existing, slight-angle, all-black PS4 model, only with a "third-wedge" addition to its width. Other technical specs were not announced at the press conference.

Cerny introduced 4K footage of PS4 Pro-compatible games launching in the future, including Ubisoft's For Honor and Insomniac's upcoming Spider-Man game, along with previously released games like last month's Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. During these demonstrations, Cerny made clear that models and textures were the "exact same ones that were created for the PS4," with the newer Pro system pulling the rendering weight to boost to something that works on a 4K display. He stressed that the system pulled the brunt of the work, as opposed to game developers, so that "smaller teams can bring their titles to PS4 Pro and the new world of higher resolution displays."

PS4's mod support in Fallout 4 is still as barren as the game's landscape.

Update, September 9, 12:44 p.m. EDT: Bethesda has finally confirmed why Fallout 4 mods haven't arrived on PlayStation 4, and the developer is saying that it's Sony's fault.

"Sony has informed us they will not approve user mods the way they should work: where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition," Bethesda told fans on its official blog on Friday. "Like you, we are disappointed by Sony’s decision given the considerable time and effort we have put into this project, and the amount of time our fans have waited for mod support to arrive."

Only one of the technical limits mentioned in our original report (below), about mod storage limits, is on Sony's side, so that may very well be the sticking point that Sony refuses to budge on. Bethesda's statement leaves room for Sony to change its tune and enable the same kind of console-mod support that Xbox One players of Fallout 4 are currently enjoying.

Enlarge / Sony should finally confirm the widely known existence of the PS4 Slim tomorrow. (credit: NeoGAF)

After largely ignoring hardware news at June's E3, Sony is set to make news with the splashy, official introduction of two pieces of PlayStation hardware tomorrow. The first, a redesign being called the PS4 Slim, has already been leaked and dissected in many corners of the game press, dampening any surprise from tomorrow's expected announcement. The other, a hardware upgrade with the codename "PS4 Neo," has been confirmed to exist, but we're looking forward to confirmations of the rumours and reports surrounding the half-step.

In any case, we'll be on hand at New York's PlayStation Theater starting at 3pm Eastern/Noon Pacific/8pm UK on September 7, ready to keep you up to date with the announcements and some instant analysis as they happen. While you wait for the start, why not take a deeper dive into our expectations for the event, based on the best reporting and rumor-wrangling we've seen so far. When you're done, click the link below and get ready to follow along.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Sony stayed strangely quiet about its upcoming hardware plans back at June's E3, using the convention to focus on PS4 software instead. That silence seems set to come to an end tomorrow, though, as Sony prepares some major hardware announcements for its PlayStation Meeting event in New York City.

We'll be there live, ready to liveblog all the news of Sony's upcoming gaming plans. For now, though, here's what we expect to hear (and what we don't expect to hear) when we sit down in the PlayStation Theater tomorrow.

PS4 Slim

At this point, the redesigned PlayStation 4 has to be among the worst-kept secrets in video game industry history. It has been weeks now since word of the system first leaked out via British auction sites; the info was then quickly confirmed by a Eurogamer reporter who actually saw one in person. Since then, there has been copious additional confirmation that the new, slimmed down system is real. That includes an extensive review and video from Let's Play Video Games and even a full teardown showing the system's redesigned innards.

Enlarge / A scene from Another Metroid 2 Remake, one of many fan games recently taken offline by Nintendo DMCA requests.

Online game distributor Game Jolt has removed over 500 fan games from its public pages after it says it received a DMCA request from Nintendo, highlighting a more-focused crackdown on such games from the 3DS and Wii U maker.

The DMCA request, which has been republished by Game Jolt in the name of transparency, focuses on fan games that use the characters, names, and locations of the Mario, Zelda, and Pokemon franchises. The list of affected games ranges from standard copyright and trademark infringement like Mario Minecraft and Pokemon: PewdiePie Edition to more explicitly brand-damaging titles like Mario on Drugs and Pokemon: Death Version.

Game Jolt says affected titles will still be accessible by the creators in a "locked" mode, to ensure no one loses access to their own data. A Nintendo representative was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from Ars.

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A new Wall Street Journal report adds credence to previous rumors that Nintendo is planning to use cartridges, rather than optical discs, for its still-shadowy NX console.

The report, which cites unnamed "people familiar with the matter," suggests that advances in flash memory production have made cartridge media closer to cost-competitive with the standard optical discs. The report also suggests that cartridges "load faster, are harder to copy, and can be mass-produced faster than discs," statements that we'd rate as true, plausible, and confusing, respectively.

More importantly, though, using cartridges would be key for a system that can be used as both a TV-based console and a portable game system, as has been rumored numerous times in the past year. Housing an optical drive in a portable system adds significantly to its size and bulk, and the motor to spin the disc can be a significant power drain. Sony's did manage to squeeze a proprietary disc drive into its PlayStation Portable, but decided to shift back to flash-based cards for the PlayStation Vita.

Enlarge / That single cord going down to a pocket sure looks more appealing than the thick wire usually connecting the Vive to a PC tower. (credit: Quark VR)

As much as we love the HTC Vive, we're still annoyed by the long, thick wire required to connect the VR headset to a PC tower (backpack laptops notwithstanding). A Bulgarian VR startup is promising a fix to the problem, though, saying that an untethered, wireless solution for the HTC Vive will be ready for demonstration sometime this fall.

Quark VR says it realized the importance of taking the Vive wireless after a public demo in Sofia, Bulgaria left most players "quite disturbed by the cables in their feet or above their head." From there, Quark met with Valve representatives during a recent stay at a Silicon Valley incubator, and the company says Valve was "more than happy to cooperate with us on the task... we’re incredibly happy the guys from Valve are so open to cooperation and improving their amazing creation." (A Valve representative was not immediately available to comment).

Quark's setup isn't entirely "wireless," if you want to get technical about it. There's still a large wire running from the headset to a small transmitter "gadget" that sits in the user's pocket. Quibbling over wording misses the point, though, which is that this prototype means no more worries about tripping over, twisting, or pulling the cables out of the computer as you walk and turn around your VR room.

Enlarge / Yup, this is a thing that's happening in the year 2016... (credit: guacasaurs_mex / Instagram)

I know a surprising number of people who desperately want to play Pokémon Go, but their phones are too old to run the game reliably. For those people, a cheap, used Dreamcast with a portable Visual Memory Unit might be the cheapest way to simulate the Pokémon Go experience until their next upgrade cycle. That's because of Pokémon Go VMU, a cheeky homebrew project from a VMU coder going by the handle guacasaurus_mex.

True, the Dreamcast's underpowered memory-card-with-a-screen-and-buttons doesn't feature the GPS antenna and augmented reality camera that help make Pokémon Go possible on smartphones. Still, guacasaurus_rex promises a randomly generated map grid to navigate on the 48x32 pixel monochrome LCD screen. There will even be a little timing-based mini-game for catching the little monsters in Pokéballs to fill in for those little touchscreen swipes.

The VMU "port" isn't planned for release until next year, though, because "it's going to take forever to draw all those damn Pokémon." Hopefully Pokémon Go will still be a relevant gaming phenomenon by then, eh?