Sony's decision to allow developers to do whatever they want to with the PlayStation 4 Pro certainly has its benefits: it puts less pressure on already taxed teams and it gives studios more freedom to explore what they feel is best for their game. But there is a catch: with so many different approaches, a few games don't take advantage of the hardware in the best possible way.

One bizarre omission in a handful of titles – including, bafflingly, a couple of first-party ones – has been the removal of supersampling for 1080p television owners. Essentially, the way this technology works is when a game is running at a higher resolution – be it native 4K, a checkerboard 4K solution, or anywhere in-between – the image is resized to 1080p to create flawless picture quality.

And this is the case with almost all PS4 Pro titles, but there are a few that lack this feature for no real reason at all. This is something that Sony needs to solve, whether it's by adding supersampling functionality at an operating system level or by mandating the functionality to developers; even if it's only a few titles, this shouldn't be happening at all – especially when Xbox Scorpio is guaranteeing supersampling across the board.

To be fair, Microsoft's solution for different graphical options seems much more elegant in comparison – it's clearly paid attention to Sony's missteps. For example, in a game like The Last Guardian, if you've got a 4K television hooked up, you're locked into using that game's 4K resolution mode – even though its 1080p option has marginally better performance.

In the Xbox Scorpio you'll be able to toggle between resolution and performance where available, regardless of which display you're on. It's a small added touch, but it's one that Sony should be paying attention to – our hope is that it's already working on either mandating this at a development level or integrating some nifty new firmware features that do the heavy work.

Another feather in the Xbox Scorpio's cap is the way in which it will improve texture filtering without the need for a patch. Consider how the PS4 Pro's boost mode amps up performance, the Xbox Scorpio actually re-writes texture filtering in every game and bumps it up to 16x anisotropic filtering, meaning that textures will appear a higher quality at a distance. It's something, again, that Sony should probably look into.

But, of course, while this article illustrates several things that the Japanese giant should be looking to steal for its mid-gen hardware, it also demonstrates the niche nature of some of these improvements. Many of you reading this article won't have even read the words "supersampling" and "anisotropic filtering" before, and while they do improve image quality, only the hardest of the hardcore will care.

That doesn't mean that Sony shouldn't be paying attention, though.