“Match Made In Heaven”: Hands-On With GT Sport & PS4 Pro

With all the new information coming straight from the PS4 Pro Event in Big Ben’s hometown, we’re getting our first real view of GT Sport post-delay announcement. As we learned yesterday, the game will support 4K resolution and HDR via PS4 Pro. Now, some more light has been shone on the exact nature of these specifications.

According to Stefan over at TheSixthAxis.com, the game doesn’t actually run at a true 4K (2160p) resolution on the Pro, but instead at 1800p with checkerboarding. Kazunori notes the human eye has trouble differentiating between the two while in motion, which is the reason why Polyphony opted for the latter option and the improved stability it would bring.

The preview also briefly touches on the physics of the game. As Stefan tells it, the handling’s overriding characteristic is one of neutrality, through both the McLaren 650S (on tarmac) and Mitsubishi Evo X (on dirt) he drove. He does talk about the high-end Thrustmaster T300 used at the event, and expresses a desire for more feedback through the rim.

Rallying on the hardest difficulty proves difficult; racing through Tokyo, less so. “When I failed to control it around [the] Expressway,” says Stefan, “it was just a barrier or another car there to greet me and help me on my way.” Perhaps vehicular damage — with real consequences — is one of the yet-to-be revealed features Kazunori teased with the original delay announcement.

The “VR Tour Mode” would feature a similarly diverse pairing, with Audi’s R18 racer and the ND-gen Miata on offer (watch a short clip of the Mazda here). The virtual reality implementation garners positive remarks, comparing favourably to Driveclub VR. That game makes do with the vanilla PS4 — though it is set for a Pro-enabling patch — and the question of how much of a difference the consoles make is brought up:

“There’s a feeling that, while PSVR is a very good system, the power of the standard PS4 holds it back and the PS4 Pro should unlock something extra, something a little bit more special. Without the two base consoles side by side, it’s impossible to know how true that is for GT Sport’s VR  – something felt lost in translation, but Kaz skirted round a question about if PSVR support would be a Pro exclusive feature.”

While Stefan stresses in the article comments that a translation mix-up really is the likely culprit, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out one of the supposed tenets of Sony’s two-system approach is no exclusive gameplay features for Pro-enabled titles.

Hopefully, now that we’ve seen GT Sport running with VR on the uber-PS4, we’ll see it running on a regular system in the near future. All eyes on the PlayStation Experience, then…

UPDATE: TheSixthAxis clarified some details for us on Twitter. The wheel used at the event was the Thrustmaster T300. The cars used in the 4K demonstration were the McLaren 650S and the Mitsubishi Evolution X, while the VR demo used the Audi R18 and the ND-gen Miata.

See more articles on 4K Resolution, Kazunori Yamauchi, PlayStation 4 Pro, and PlayStation VR.