Stefan Mileschin

Just how impressive is the PS4 Pro's "Boost Mode?" Digital Foundry has taken the new feature to task, and if I said that it didn't make a degree of difference, I'd be lying—they found that some games saw framerate increases of up to 38 percent. Loading times on some titles are even seeing significant improvement. But while Boost Mode sounds like quite the success, it really highlights just how subpar games perform on the original hardware. Many, it seems, never ran consistently at all. …what does this new addition to the PlayStation 4 Pro's capabilities actually deliver on a technical level?The working theory we have is pretty straightforward. In graphics-limited tests, boost mode consistently delivers a 14 per cent increase in frame-rate and we suspect that it is not coincidence that the GPU clock speed bump from base to Pro hardware is 111MHz - pretty much exactly 14 per cent. The suggestion is that when running base mode with boost active, the Pro 'half' of the larger GPU remains inactive, but additional clocks are deployed instead. Meanwhile, the CPU appears to enjoy the full benefit of the additional power the Pro provides. The Assassin's Creed Unity tests we carried out show an almost linear scaling in performance - 23fps gameplay on base scales to 30fps in boost mode, exactly in line with the additional 31 per cent of CPU power the Pro is capable of delivering.

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