Tech outlet Digital Foundry has conducted extensive tests on the PlayStation 4 Pro to assess whether it’s worth upgrading the console with an SSD or not. The most notable result is that games run faster with an SSD but the margin of improvement compared to the same upgrade on a standard PS4 isn’t significant, with Digital Foundry concluding that PS4 Pro’s SATA 3.0 interface “doesn’t really make the most of an SSD upgrade.”
When testing The Witcher 3, for instance, the upgrade only offered a two-second advantage “over the same drive hosting the same data” on the standard PS4. The publication further wrote:
The Witcher 3 results serve as a template that carries over into several other games. Fallout 4 is a great example; we picked a saved game in Concord town – one of the longest initial loads we’ve found, at 55 seconds on the base PS4’s stock drive. When it comes to the SSD results though, again, we’re staring at similar, slight margins between base and Pro models, with just a three second advantage on the new console. However, once again, we’re getting a more tangible gain when comparing the stock mechanical drives – a seven second boost on the Pro.
Just Cause 3 offers up some differing results too. Loading a new game puts the PS4 Pro at just one second ahead on SSD, next to the standard PS4. However, this is one title where the older PS4 HDD is actually faster than its 1TB successor, offering a seven second advantage. It’s unusual compared to most of our other tests, but it shows there’s some variance when it comes to mechanical drives with large tables of contents.
The good news, however, is that the PS4 Pro’s 1TB 5400rpm drive makes most games load faster than the standard PS4 without the need for an upgrade.
For more on the PS4 Pro, check out our previous coverage.
[Source: Eurogamer]
