GT Sport on PS4 Pro: 4K impresses, but what about 1080p support?
Three years into the current console generation, legendary developer Polyphony Digital is almost ready to unleash its first PlayStation 4 title - Gran Turismo Sport. We've been spending time with the beta version of the game recently and we're happy to report a big leap in fidelity over the series' PS3 audio-visuals: there's a radical revamp in terms of materials, detail, lighting quality and engine acoustics. We'll have a more in-depth analysis of this later, but the beta also gives us our first opportunity to see how Polyphony is making use of the additional power offered by PlayStation 4 Pro.
Series creator Kazunori Yamauchi gave us the headline facts and figures for Pro support back in March, revealing an impressive spec for users with 4K screens: rendering resolution is set to 1800p, achieved using checkerboard upscaling. The bt.2020 colour space is utilised along with HDR rendering, with Yamauchi telling journalists that this allows Ferrari red to be accurately represented in a video game for the first time.
GT Sport's HDR support is also exemplary - with support for displays operating up to 10,000 nits, effectively ensuring that the high dynamic range rendering is future-proofed for the much more capable HDR TVs to come. The GT Sport beta offers up an HDR brightness slider for tweaking to your individual display, and even on less capable mid-range HDR screens, the effect is impressive.
Our own pixel counts confirm both the 1800p resolution, plus the checkerboarding upscale effect. You don't get the pristine 1:1 pixel mapping found from a native 4K output, but as the video on this page demonstrates, the overall effect is excellent and certainly a huge upgrade from the standard, base 1080p mode. It's another example of how clever rendering techniques are allowing the Pro GPU to effectively punch above its weight, and it's good to see decent support for 4K displays here, when too many Pro titles are lurking in 1440p territory - if there is support for the new console at all (Prey and Shadow Warrior 2 are two recent releases with no Pro features whatsoever).
