Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I bought the LAST PS4”.
Did you know that Sony still sell the PS4 brand new for three hundred and thirty dollars? What three hundred and thirty dollars isn’t that more than this was when it first came out in 2016.? This is a brand new PlayStation 4.. No, not a PS4 Pro A PS5. No, this is a PS4 slim. Why they’re selling a 330 PS4 that’s almost 10 years old when the PS5 exists, let’s find out we’re gon na crack.
The seal one of the very last brand new PS4s ever made goodbye resale value. Okay, it’s done you did it. I did it.
Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate it so for refers. You actually don’t have to buy this specific console, so Sony actually are also selling the vanilla PS4s for 300.
Bucks you’ll find them in stock at a couple of stores right now, but it does seem like they made a lot more of the Modern Warfare consoles, which are 30 bucks extra but does come with a digital copy of the game. Oh, it’s a little manufactured September of 2022, so it is confirmed. This is a brand new console that was manufactured just a few months ago. So it’s been about a week using the PS4 slam and there’s a lot of stuff that I like and a few things that I don’t so first thing I did was actually upgrade the hard drive since the PlayStation has started, including hard drives all the way back On the PS2, you’ve always been able to do this and it is very straightforward on the PS4 slam.
This model comes with a one terabyte hard drive, which is totally fine, but instead for only 60 bucks. I upgraded this with a one terabyte SSD now sure you could use the hard drive that comes with it is going to be completely fine, but having the SSD is going to give me now a little bit more speed, especially when it comes to load times. But importantly, if you are using a 500 gig, PS4 you’re going to notice a very, very real problem, because four games have gotten huge, like I kind of knew this from like the PS5 the games. You know 70 80, 90 gigs.
But I didn’t really realize the games on PS4. Even the base model are also still pretty much that same size, meaning that five or six AAA games in that 500 gig Drive is full, so going up to one terabyte, I think, is a no-brainer, especially at 60 bucks. It’S easy! It’S quick! I’M not saying that! You need to do this for your PS4, but I do think I actually made a little bit of a difference here. Something else that I found with the PS4 is how much I like this interface right, which should be fair. I also love the XMD on the PS3 and not to say anything negative about the PS5. I think it’s also a nicely designed interface, but I was really kind of struck, especially with this SSD of just how Snappy Everything feels it could just be a little bit of a placebo, because it’s not that big of a difference, but it definitely felt kind of Pleasant going back to using the PS4, there are also some legitimate advantages to the software support on the PS4, specifically when it comes to Media. So not only does it support more file formats than the PS5 which doesn’t support AVI or mpeg-2. This also has much better audio support with movs and mkvs, and the PS4 supports subtitles, which the PS5 is super spotty with it’s almost like. They want you to sign up for Crunchyroll instead of downloading and loading up on a USB or anime, or something not that Sony would ever do something like that and Nerf their newer console or anything.
Now. Yes, you only have 1080p out on the PS4, which I’ll admit is a pretty big bummer if you’re watching something like Netflix and YouTube and stuff. Those are all pretty much the same experiences but especially if you plan on using the PS4 as a little bit more of a media machine. There are some legitimate advantages to this. The PS5 can’t touch it does kind of feel like Sony, maybe watered the PS5 down a little bit, probably because they want you to play games on it, and especially when you consider the fact that if you want a disk drive in the PS5, that’s 200. More than this, it does actually make the PS4 make a little bit more sense, but I wish I had 4K support another breath of fresh air. Not only does this come with a full warranty, but importantly, it’s not um. How should I say this um scuffed by GameStop, I’m not trying to throw shade on GameStop or anything, but while it might seem crazy to spend 300 on a new PS4 GameStop are selling these PS4s for 250 bucks and while 50 bucks is 50 bucks. Having a brand new system that has not been abused doesn’t have 10 year old thermal paste or six-year-old thermal paste, it’s not all gummed up.
I can see a little bit of an argument there because I think when I went to this video, I saw that Sony still sold the PS4. I’M like what why, when you consider that PS4s and especially PS4 Pros, have kept such good resale value, it does kind of make sense for Sony to do another run of these. In fact, actually in the middle of making this video, I was at Target and actually saw a few PS4s on the shelves, the only PlayStation I actually could buy in the store so clearly they’re making these and people are buying them.
It’S not just to plug the hole in PS5 sales because they didn’t have enough to you know, hit stored shelf right like the PS4, does actually have a real place. Now, I’m not going to tell you to buy one of these because it’s gon na be a great long term play, but if you’re considering buying a PS4 now the prices have not plummeted, like they did last generation. In fact it’s almost the opposite.
These have hardly lost any value at all in the seven years that the PS4 slim is out. Look just think about that for a second good yeah. So I thought I can sit here and talk all day long about the software and the hardware, but you buy a PlayStation to play games and my biggest fear going into this video was how well the 10 year old Hardware would hold up with modern games, because It’S easy to forget: this is still supported by the vast majority of games that are coming out into 2022 and into 2023. mind. You we’ll see how that evolves over the next year or two and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but for games that you can play and they’re coming out right now. The PS4 is still largely the console that they are developing for, and I will tell you for sure this base PS4 is holding up a lot better than the Xbox one, which feels like it’s just waiting for someone to come and put it out of its misery.
The first game I played was Warzone 2.0. Now again, this is a game, well technically Modern Warfare, but this is a game that was included in the box right, so they’re, clearly trying to say that hey. This is a great experience and it’s a pretty good experience. Now Warzone 2 definitely feels like it has been designed line with Next Generation consoles in mind. I do think this is an area where the SSD that I installed here is making a little bit of a difference right. It is a massive open world.
It’S like 150 players or something – and I would say the experience is generally pretty decent when it comes to image quality. I think one of the things that really jumps out to me is while obviously you’re running at like lower settings, no lower resolutions and that kind of stuff. But the thing that is a little bit bothersome, especially if you’ve played any of the newer consoles, is how soft the image quality is.
It’S clear, they’re doing a lot of things like temporal anti-aliasing, which is trying to reconstruct over multiple frames sort of extra details so that you can kind of mask that lower sort of pixel count, and I think it’s largely successful. It just has a sort of side effect of making everything just look a little like vasolini, but if that’s the trade-off between being able to play these games and enjoy them on this older hardware, for me, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to do, because otherwise You can go full Nintendo switch mode me playing it like 480p and it’s going to look like garbage right like all these sort of post-processing effects, especially in Call of Duty with, like the motion blur and the film grain and stuff, it’s trying to dress up an Image, which is a little bit subpar, I think it does a fairly solid job and in fact I would actually say the performance is reasonable: you’re not getting a locked 60fps most of the time, but it’s also not like diving into the 20s like again, if you Think back to the end of like the PS3 generation, those later games were not running. Well, maybe the Call of Duties were a little bit better optimized than a lot of other games.
But if you just think about from the context of this is a 10 year old game console and the fact that brand new games are coming out today that are running pretty well, I think it’s an impressive feat and it’s even doubly so if you look at Some of the dedicated first party titles for PlayStation, a game that has no issues pretty much whatsoever – is Gran Turismo 7.. Now this is a game that I’m very familiar with because I’ve been playing it on the PS5 since it came out last year. So I know what this game looks like: I know how it performs and honestly the PS4 is incredibly impressive. Yes, you’re losing a little bit of the Fidelity and yes you’re running at 1080p, but the performance Rock Solid, very, very impressive and the visuals honestly, not that big of a downgrade, certainly nowhere near as much as I thought now sure.
If you want to go digital Foundry on it, you can definitely pixel Peeps and little issues here and there, and it’s certainly not going to be the full experience of the world, but as far as actually playing the game focusing on the gameplay and not you know The the vistas and the close-up shots of the cars and everything honestly, you could probably fool me if I’m playing a 1080p display, I probably wouldn’t immediately be able to pick out the PS5 right like it is incredibly impressive. This is running on base. Ps4 people could be really mad at me. Now, like you, can’t tell the difference. What about the weight racing? How am I supposed to deal with this ambient occlusion? Another game which runs surprisingly well on the base? Ps4 is fortnite now, while it’s a little bit of an older game, epic have done an absolutely incredible job of constantly updating the game, and, specifically recently I got an update to go to Unreal Engine 5. and I got ta say it looks great now, with a Little caveat that, of course, you’re not getting all those features from the PS5.
You missed the like the global illumination and some of the ray tracing features and just some of the sheer like draw distance and whatnot, and yes, just like in Warzone. There are some frame drops you’re, not sitting at a Smooth, Lock, 60fps, but also just like Warzone you’re, getting 40 50 a lot of time, and I will say that on the whole plane war zone and fortnite back to back as their broadly similar kind of open World Games fortnite runs better right and I would say, fortnite looks better right, like it’s clear that epic have Juiced, absolutely every single teraflop they can out of the PS4 at this point, which is only 1.3 or 1.8, but every single one of those flops are flopping Hard boy, I’m glad I’m not digital Foundry, okay, so there’s a lot of good uh, honestly a surprising amount of good right. I had very low expectations going in, but then there’s also some bad. First and foremost, this is a a 10 year old console this year.
Right, not the PS4 slim specifically, but the base PS4 Hardware, which is identical to this as far as performance. It is old from this point forward. I think that they’ve sold enough ps5s that honestly, a lot of developers are gon na be like I don’t have to deal with this PS4 anymore. That’S just a hunch.
Maybe this has another couple years of great software. Support and I’ll be very surprised, but it does feel like with these DLCs and with games starting to become more and more exclusive to PS5. It does make sense because, while this is a remarkably competent device, considering has made it 10 years, there are still some major drawbacks compared to a modern console. First and foremost, is the CPU. It is bad. Let’S go use a different word. I’Ma stick with bad. This was a mobile 8 core processor that was literally the only thing AMD had off the shelf at the time when they were developing this back in 2012, 2013, like the CPU, is hilariously slow.
Even by like the standards of what you got on your in your pocket for your phone, while the GPU is decent, it lacks a lot of modern features. It’S just like Ray tracing whatnot and while I’ve upgraded this with an SSD again, a developer has to assume that this is running a slow, hard drive, which also severely impacts the size and loading times like open worlds and stuff. Like it’s clear. The PS4 is starting to run into the the inevitable March of time, and I think that gaming as a whole will be better when everything can be targeted like a PS5 and having an SSD and everything and there’s the price tickets there did.
I mention that this is 300 brand new. You know same price as it was when it came out in 2016.. It’S also easy to forget that the PS4 literally, is the only PlayStation ever besides, I guess technically the PS1 by fault, because it was the first PlayStation that doesn’t support any kind of backwards.
Compatibility and yes before you try to tell me the PS. Now is great. No, it’s not it’s not good. It wasn’t good when it first came out. It’S definitely not good. Today, I don’t want to stream a bunch of PS3 games that run like crap that look like 720p run through uh Jello Factory, like that’s, not it. The PS5, at least, will play PS4 games PS4 pro games, we’ll take advantage of any kind of optimizations. The games have sort of developed and you can’t play PS1 PS2 games. Anything like that, which is arguably kind of one of the reasons why I would actually say that you may want to consider a PS3, especially in earlier PS3, that has full PS2 backups compatibility.
If you want a single device that will give you a lot right now. Ps3 plus a PS5 will play basically every PlayStation game of all time short of the Vita. I guess, but if only there was a next-gen console that was readily available for 300 and sometimes 250 bucks and really really rarely sometimes 230 dollars. That has all the wonderful features and um it’s Xbox series s. You should buy that and I’m kidding I loved spending time with this PS4. It is so much fun to go back and it is surprising to see just how much works, but this series s is better in almost every single way right like almost every single way.
Yes, it has a smaller SSD, so it’s only got about 500 gigs, as opposed to one terabyte, and that does make a difference when games are huge, and unlike this, you can’t easily upgrade that you pretty much have to buy one of the very expensive Xbox sort Of little memory sticks, which are like 200 bucks on their own right. So I get that, but if you can be a little bit uh careful with your storage, you are going to find. That is a much better experience. The series asks, while it can output 4K.
Most games are largely targeted, 1080p they’re, always always going to look better than what you’ve got on the PS4. And importantly, it feels like it’s. A better long-term play. Right games are going to be coming out for the Xbox series s for years and years and years and years and years from now it is part of this current generation of gaming.
It’S not going anywhere this PS4. The life cycle is not going to be that much longer right, like even in that optimistic estimate of you know another year or two of decent support like that’s, not gon na even hold a candle to where the series s is going to be in five. Six. Seven years right, which I still think it will be fully supported at that point, I got ta say most people who are even remotely considering buying this PS4 should just buy a PS5 or a series X, like that’s the sad part of this video, because it’s better Than I expected, but I expected it to be really bad.
So that’s not exactly a resounding recommendation. I think there’s a PS4 deserves a long happy retirement as a device that has great media controls. That has a really nice software layer has tons and tons and tons of games that perform well. You can even stream your PS5 on your PS4. It just doesn’t need to be 300. Thank you very much for watching make sure to subscribe. If you enjoyed this video – and let me know what console, should I try to resurrect from the dead next time, .