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Today, the embargo lifts on PlayStation 4 Pro. We've published our review and the first 4K video covering a range of PS4 Pro titles, and it's the culmination of several months of behind the scenes research on upgrading our workflow to accommodate 4K - ultra HD. Today I'm inviting you to support Digital Foundry via an inexpensive $5 per month Patreon that allows you to support this kind of work, while giving you access to high-end video encodes of all our content going forward.Coming out of the PlayStation Meeting a couple of months back, we became acutely aware of how difficult it is to capture the 4K experience with bandwidth-constrained streaming platforms like YouTube. Platforms like this specialise in convenient, easy streaming but fast action gaming is often reduced to a sea of blurriness and macroblocks. The whole point of 4K is its pristine level of presentation, and we've swiftly discovered that existing 4K streaming content actually seems to resolve lower levels than 1080p. We couldn't show you what PS4 Pro - or indeed other high-end gaming hardware - was capable of, because the platform didn't exist to get the job done. So we decided to build it.
We use a quality-based h.264 encode, processing every frame to a set standard - bandwidth varies according to the complexity of the scene, but average bit-rate can be anything up to 100mbps in the most extreme circumstances. It's a brute force approach to the issue but it gets the job done - the only issue being that bandwidth costs money. That's why we've attached a small cost of entry to the content. You can see my full pitch below, and check out the new DigitalFoundry.net site, where we have a sample video you can download. We'll also be uploading our 1080p content too, where there are also big picture quality improvements over the YouTube experience.
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