Does PlayStation 4 Pro really improve virtual reality performance?

On the face of it Sony's decision to sacrifice resolution seems surprising but the trade off is an improved frame-rate which makes the viewing experience as a whole much smoother, says Will Freeman

With the arrival of the current generation of virtual reality, much of the battle for hardware supremacy has focused on one seemingly esoteric factor: the trade-off between image resolution and frame-rate.

It may seem like a curiously technical point on which to define a consumer product war, but with VR, how a game is displayed isn't just a matter of aesthetics; it can severely impact user comfort, and even function. In designing their respective headsets, the teams behind Oculus' Rift and HTC's Vive opted to offer high display resolution. Each headset sports a 2160 x 1200 overall output, comfortably trumping PlayStation VR's 1920 x 1080 fidelity.