Prey developer Arkane Studios patched the game yesterday to add long-awaited support for the PlayStation 4 Pro, finally making an effort to live up to the billing on the box that indicates the game is a “PS4 Pro Enhanced” title.
The version 1.04 patch, which was released yesterday evening on PS4 and is coming to Windows PC and Xbox One later this week, delivers a suite of features that improve the look of Prey on the PS4 Pro. Enhancements include screen-space reflections, higher-quality shadows, 16x anisotropic filtering (up from 4x) and a general state of “improved visual fidelity.” You can check out the full list in the patch notes.
This is the first time that Arkane or Prey publisher Bethesda Softworks has specified any details of the game’s PS4 Pro support. That’s probably because before the v1.04 patch, there weren’t actually any PS4 Pro features in Prey — which was infuriating to buyers (and potential customers), since the game’s case bears the “PS4 Pro Enhanced” label. We’d reached out to both Bethesda and Sony on multiple occasions since Prey’s release nearly four weeks ago, but never heard back about the game’s supposed PS4 Pro support.
In their multiplatform breakdown of Prey, here’s what the graphics analysts at Digital Foundry had to say about the game’s “non-existent PS4 Pro support”:
Despite the retail packaging suggesting that PS4 Pro support is included, we could find no improvements whatsoever. The resolution remains identical, frame-rate is still locked to 30fps and even the lacklustre texture filtering is the same. ... [It’s] surprising that Sony would allow for a high-profile title to hit the market place touting support for the enhanced hardware when practically, there is none.
While Digital Foundry hasn’t yet had the chance to reassess Prey, comparison shots from GearNuke indicate some subtle improvements, with the most noticeable upgrades coming in the areas of shadow detail and lighting. However, the patch doesn’t increase the game’s resolution or frame rate on a PS4 Pro — Prey still runs in 1080p at 30 frames per second on all PS4s.
The v1.04 patch also includes further attempts to address the player drifting issues that people have been running into on PS4, along with a bunch of bug fixes.
Update (June 1): Digital Foundry re-examined Prey after the v1.04 patch, and found that while the PS4 Pro support works as advertised, the update introduced new problems — on both PS4 and Xbox One.