We emerged from our meeting with VooFoo with 209GB of 60fps ultra HD captures swiped directly from the HDMI 2.0 port of a PS4 Pro test station (an anonymous-looking piece of kit, rather like a first-gen cable/satellite set-top box), and can confirm that it is indeed running at native resolution with no checkerboarding or other upscaling techniques. By and large, standard single-player gameplay does indeed stick to the 60fps target, but there are occasional drops down to the mid-50s. It's not unduly impactful to gameplay, but owing to the importance of the game's ever-shifting camera angles, the judder is noticeable. The code we played wasn't*final-finalbut it was as good as. Production internally at VooFoo has moved onto DLC, with a new area promised to complement the two already present in the game. The chances are that this is the performance profile of the final game.
On paper though, the technical accomplishment here is impressive. VooFoo has quadrupled resolution over the base PS4 version, and it has done this using a GPU that only has 2.3x the compute power of the older hardware and only 25 per cent more memory bandwidth. Either the base PS4 is being significantly underutilised (in which case we would expect an improvement on its 2x MSAA) or there's something more going on behind the scenes. The team joked about 'Mantis magic' before revealing that exploiting enhancements made to the PlayStation 4 Pro GPU have paid dividends.
Of course, we already knew that the Pro graphics core implements a range of new instructions - it was part of the initial leak - but we didn't really know exactly what they could actually do. As we understand it, with the new enhancements, it's possible to complete two 16-bit floating point operations in the time taken to complete one on the base PS4 hardware. The end result from the new Radeon technology is the additional throughput required to making Mantis Burn Racing hit its 4K performance target, though significant shader optimisation was required on the part of the developer.
In short, there's more to PS4 Pro's enhancements than teraflop comparisons suggest - and we understand that there are more 'secret sauce' features still to be revealed. At the PlayStation Meeting, Sony staff told me that the enhancements made to the core hardware go beyond the checkerboard upscaling technology, and the new instructions certainly support Mark Cerny's assertion that the PS4 Pro possesses graphics features not found in AMD's current Polaris line of GPUs. Interesting stuff, and we look forward to learning more.
VooFoo plans to announce the release date of Mantis Burn Racing in the very near future, but the PC version is already available to purchase via Steam Early Access. The code was updated earlier this week to encompass the vast majority of the final game's content, with only the career end-game missing. So if we you want to check out the title on PC, that option is already open. Anti-aliasing, texture filtering and some foliage elements show improvement over the PS4 Pro version at 4K at max settings, though the small differences mostly vanish when comparing the console's 1080p SSAA mode with PC's native full HD output.
As things stand, we can safely assume that Mantis Burn Racing will be available on PS4 significantly ahead of the Pro's November 10th launch and in line with all games for the new Sony console, the same purchase works on both base PS4 and the new Pro hardware (an Xbox One version is due too). Don't go in expecting a triple-A state of the art title, but as a smaller scale, cheaper indie title based on attractive visuals, smooth frame-rate and a highly enjoyable drift mechanic, it hands in a fun, good-looking experience that delivers exactly what it sets out to achieve.
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