PS4 Pro is a waste of money (aka, why PC Gaming is not dead)

I recently got into playing APEX Legends on the PC, which is a fantastic game... I'm a first-person player, and I didn't like Fortnite's third-person or it's cheezy crafting system, so APEX is a really refreshing battle royale to pull me away from playing PUBG.

Several weeks after the game release, we're seeing more and more "suspiciously good players". Not all of them are cheaters, but seeing as they just banned 350k cheaters, I'm sure some of them are. A friend of mine pointed out that cheaters are much less common on console... which got me curious.

What is the gaming experience on consoles like these days? Are there fewer cheaters? What is the rendering like? I couldn't aim at the broad side of a barn with a console controller, but then I found this XIM APEX device which secretly maps your mouse and keyboard to controller inputs, so your game doesn't even know you're using mouse keyboard (which means they can't stop you either).

So I tossed some money to the wind, and picked up a PS4 Pro and a XIM APEX to find out.

I went the PS4 route, because you can play PS4 F2P online games like APEX Legends and Fortnite without a playstation plus subscription, but on XBone you have to pay Microsoft a monthly fee just to play a free to play game. I hardly ever play consoles, so that seems really dumb, but it's not strictly the cost that bothers me, it's my morale objection to being taken for a ride by the monopoly.

Back to the PS4, what did I learn from all this?

Compared to a gaming PC, a PS4 Pro is a waste of money, and PS4 Pro plus XIM APEX is an even bigger waste of money. 

If you really prefer to game on your living room couch, with a controller, 4 to 8 feet from your big-screen TV, maybe a PS4 slim is worth $300 to you, but if you want to play games that need better gaming horsepower, and you're going to play them 24" from a monitor at a desk, especially with mouse-keyboard, then have some self-respect and get a gaming PC instead.

NOTE: Some people are confused by the claim of 4k gaming on a PS4 Pro. The PS4 Pro never renders above 1080p, and sometimes it renders at even lower resolutions. It puts out 4k by using blurry upscaling techniques, which are aptly termed "faker 4k". I can plug any 1080p signal into a 4k monitor and get "faker 4k" so please just ignore this marketing garbage. Here we're only concerned with pixels actually rendered by the 3d GPU, at 1080p.

GTX 1060 Gaming PC trounces PS4 Pro

I think this simple cost comparison explains it all...

PS4 Pro + XIM APEX + 1 year of Playstation Plus = $645.
GTX 1060 Gaming PC (~30% faster and 10x better than PS4 Pro) = $750.

Of course the PS4 Pro itself only costs $400, so you can get started for cheaper. However, as you try to crawl out of the hole you've put yourself in with that lower initial cost, you will spend more and more and in the end you still won't have something that holds a candle to a gaming PC.

It's hard to find side-by-side performance comparisons of these two setups, because it's a bit of apples-to-oranges. However, here are some numbers:

PS4 Pro - 8GB shared VRAM
GTX1060PC - 8GB system RAM, 6GB VRAM




That GTX 1060 is notably faster than the PS4 Pro, both in GPU and CPU. Plus, the PS4 Pro has 8GB memory total, while the Gaming PC has 8GB of system RAM and 6GB of graphics VRAM.

What is XIM APEX?

What XIM APEX does is operate as a "man in the middle" for USB connected console controllers, pretending to be your controller in a way that the console doesn't know is happening. My limited experience with it so far is that it works pretty well, but I did have some weird issues not registering simultaneous key-presses on my USB connected keyboard. I'm not yet sure if it's an issue with XIM, the keyboard itself, or what the console will accept. I'm going to do some testing.

The Good:

The XIM APEX smartphone configuration UI, especially in advanced mode, is very powerful. It lets you map mouse/keyboard to controller actions, and you can make several different mode pages per game. These can either be operated by the in-game keybinds, or custom toggle/hold mode keys. For example, when I hold my in-game (ping) key to bring up the APEX Legends ping spin-menu, my XIM APEX config automatically switches to a different mode, which has a custom mouse-response curve, to make operating the spin menu feel "natural" on the mouse, as well as bind the mouse buttons to operate menu confirm/cancel. It's pretty amazing that this just works seamlessly, whenever I hold my ping key.

Their advanced configuration UI is much more confusing than it could be, and means they can't ship "default" configs which use all these fancy features. For example, when I have a game-button related config, such as making the mouse work differently when I hold the ping hotkey, XIM doesn't know the two are connected. One is a button mapping, the other is just a custom mode page.. If XIM knew that the custom mode page was related to the button mapping, then it could ship with that custom page already setup in the default config, and whatever I changed the button mapping to would automatically activate that mode page.  This isn't a huge deal, it just makes the out-of-the-box experience more complicated than it could be.

The bad:

The big problem is, why are we using XIM APEX to begin with? Using mouse and keyboard requires a desk, which begs to ask, why are you not just putting this money into a PC gaming setup instead?

$400 for a PS4 Pro, $125 for a XIM APEX, and unless you're only playing F2P games like Fortnite and APEX Legends, you get to pay $120 a year in idiotic console online multiplayer fees on top of that... and for what? To get super-pixelated 1080p on a device that can't run a real web browser, can't run PC games, can't alt-tab during the game, and where the translated mouse feels like a sluggish mess compared to the PC version.

The PS4 Pro GPU is said to be a bit slower than a GTX 1060, with a CPU that is underpowered compared to a PC eqivalent. Two minutes of searching turned up a $750 GTX 1060 gaming PC at best buy, and I bet with a bit more searching I could do better. This PC will have at least 30% better gaming performance, have none of the weird XIM APEX mouse-to-controller translation issues, and be massively more usable than a console.

So who is this consumer that wants XIM APEX?

A kid who's going to borrow the family console into their bedroom and try to "get more serious" with mouse keyboard? A streamer being paid to promote console titles and wants every advantage? Someone who really wants to play console exclusive titles, but refuses to pick up a controller?