Blow Details The Witness PS4 Pro Patch: 4K/30FPS 2X MSAA & 1440P/60FPS Upscaled To 4K

Aernout van de Velde
the witness ps4 pro patch 4k

The Witness creator, Jonathan Blow, has provided additional details for the upcoming The Witness PS4 Pro patch, which will release “sometime” in this month.

Back in September of this year, Blow announced that his studio would be creating a PS4 Pro patch for The Witness. At the same time, Blow stated that Checkerboard rendering on the PS4 Pro isn’t completely free, and that there might be better uses of power. Blow’s reasoning is quite interesting and deserves a read.

A 4K display mode was already confirmed for The Witness, and Blow explained that it would render in 1440P upscaled to 4K when using a 4K display. When playing on a 1080P or lower screen, The Witness would render at 1080P @ 60FPS with 4x MSAA enabled.

Blow has now confirmed however that there will be 2 visual modes when rendering on a 4K compatible display: the first mode renders in 1440P upscaled to 4K as mentioned above, while the new ‘4K’ mode renders The Witness’ game world in 4K @ 30FPS with 2x MSAA enabled.

According to Blow, the second mode was added due to high demand, and the fact that it does look “really good”.

We are definitely supporting HDR, on both the PS4 Pro and the base model PS4. If the game detects an HDR TV, it will start in HDR mode. HDR works in all resolutions mentioned below.

If you have a PS4 Pro, and are outputting to a 1080p TV, The Witness will render at 1080p, 60fps, 4x MSAA (which is substantially higher than the base PS4’s 900p, 60fps, 2x MSAA). This is the same as we announced in the earlier posting.

If you have a PS4 Pro, and are outputting to a 4k TV, then you get a choice of two modes from the options menu:
(a) 1440p 2x MSAA rendering of the game world, upscaled to 4k, text and UI rendered at 4k, 60fps
(b) 4k 2x MSAA rendering for everything, 30fps 

We added option (b) because a lot of people seem to want it, and it does look really good!

As said, the PS4 Pro patch will be released sometime in November. The Witness is available now for PS4, PC, and Xbox One.

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