Leak Shows PlayStation 4 Neo Is Expected To Have Twice The Graphics Horsepower (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes from a report via HotHardware: Following rumors of a more powerful console in Sony's not-too-distant future -- one that will be capable of playing games at a 4K resolution -- the Japanese electronics maker last month opted to confirm it is indeed in development. Called PlayStation 4 Neo, the upgraded system will bring better hardware to the console scene to meet the needs of gaming on a television with four times as many pixels as a Full HD 1080p display. What's it going to take to game at 4K in the living room? A leaked internal document outlines some very interesting specs of the new model PS4 console. Assuming the leaked document is up to date with Sony's current plans, the PS4 Neo will use the same Jaguar cores as the original PS4, but clocked 500MHz faster, with 8 cores at 2.1GHz (up from 1.6GHz). The more significant upgrade will be the GPU. According to the slide, the PS4 Neo will use an improved version of AMD's GCN compute units (CUs), with twice the number of CUs at 36 instead of 18. They'll also be clocked faster -- 911MHz versus 800MHz. The net result is a 2.3x improvement in floating point performance.

Comments

Pokemon Go

[110010001000]

I can't wait to play Pokemon Go on it in 4k.

Re:Pokemon Go

[Anonymous Coward]

I admit, mounting a PS4 to a bicycle to go catch pokemon sounds like a fun proejct.

I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

So in order to cover 4 times as many pixels, they bump the (theoretical) performance 2.3 times.
I'm not an graphics expert, but I'm gonna guess that's not nearly enough?

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Moblaster]

It does seem underpowered relative to the 4x expansion in resolution. However it makes sense from a couple perspectives... it will power virtual reality reasonably well (a PS4 in each eye), and if it is meant to play the existing base of games (with complete compatitiblity between PS4 and PS4x) then the actual number of polygons is not going to double necessarily. But you'll have some of that power going to providing sharper or better anti-aliased edges. With some enhancement of particle animations, perhaps.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[netwiz]

That was never a goal of the system. The "4K" is referring to video playback and support for 4K content, not games. This should, however, get them to 1080P @ 60FPS for pretty much every game in the library, and they've said that there will be an update path for developers to allow their games to support the new hardware performance. I think it's one of the biggest wins in consoles, that we've reached the point where it's possible to have nearly perfect backwards compatibility with older games while hardware continues to improve, with only a patch update to the games to support ever-expanding hardware performance. It's straight out of the PC playbook, to be certain, but at console price-points, with console-level reliability and ease of use.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Ecuador]

I'm not an graphics expert, but I'm gonna guess that's not nearly enough?

No, you certainly are not a graphics expert. I am not either, but at least I know that scenes are not composed and rendered for each pixel. So, when you go from 1080p to 720p which has 2.25 times less pixels, you never get 2.25 times more frame rate. It depends heavily on the game of course but at best you get something less than 2x, while at worse something like a 25% frame rate benefit.
So you don't need 4x the performance for 4x pixels and 2.3x may be enough. More accurately, it will have to be enough, because developers will know that's what they have to fit.

Re: I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe the old GPU specs had more than enough to do 1080p buy not enough to do the 4K, but somewhere closer to the middle ground, so it didn't need a 4x increase in performance to meet the demands?

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Kjella]

No, you certainly are not a graphics expert. I am not either, but at least I know that scenes are not composed and rendered for each pixel. So, when you go from 1080p to 720p which has 2.25 times less pixels, you never get 2.25 times more frame rate.

Probably because there's some kind of setup time/synchronization between different types of rendering passes. But if you think of a 3840x2160 image as four 1920x1080 quadrants you'd think each step would take roughly 4x to do with the same level of detail. Just grabbing a few benchmarks from Anandtech, Dirt Rally (DX11):

1920*1080*132 = 274 million pixels/s
2560*1440*91 = 335 million pixels/s
3840*2160*49 = 406 million pixels/s

Clearly there's some scaling here, if it can render four quadrants at 49 fps ideally it should be able to render one at 49*4 = 196 fps. So if we take 132/196 = 2/3 as a rough number for the scaling benefit it should probably take around 4*2/3 = 2.7 times the horsepower to go from 1080p60 to 2160p60. Same setup/synchronization overhead, 4x runtime on each part, I'm sure you could try doing a linear regression and use Amdahl's law to see if this makes sense. Now I'm making a ton of assumptions here, but from my napkin calculations it doesn't look all that bad.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[beelsebob]

It's on the limit, but it actually should be okay. Why? Because fragment shading (the act of determining the colour of a pixel on the screen) is not the only operation that a GPU does. Lots of time is also spent in compute shaders, vertex shaders and tesselation shaders. Directing all this extra horsepower to the need to deal with 4 times more fragments should be fine.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Yvan256]

You are indeed not a graphics expert. People assume that display resolution is a strict relationship of pixels to GPU power, but *actually* from a non-mathematical, non-graphical viewpoint - it's more like a big array of wibbly wobbly... pixel-y shaded... stuff.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

From the last Tomshardware review of the GTX 1080, at 2160p vs 1440p (2.25x more pixels), we get 79% the frame rate for Ashes of Singularity, a little over 50% for BF 4 and GTA V, 64% for Hitman, 69% for CARS etc. So it varies wildly per game and also there is no incentive for developers to optimize a specific resolution for a specific card.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[HornWumpus]

Current PS4 does good to hit 30fps in most games.

30fps isn't enough for VR. They will have to downgrade graphics with software to make it work.

Re: I don't think that's enough

[HornWumpus]

Or maybe not. How many current PS4 games get 60fps at 1080p?

Re:I don't think that's enough

[David_Hart]

That was never a goal of the system. The "4K" is referring to video playback and support for 4K content, not games. This should, however, get them to 1080P @ 60FPS for pretty much every game in the library, and they've said that there will be an update path for developers to allow their games to support the new hardware performance. I think it's one of the biggest wins in consoles, that we've reached the point where it's possible to have nearly perfect backwards compatibility with older games while hardware continues to improve, with only a patch update to the games to support ever-expanding hardware performance. It's straight out of the PC playbook, to be certain, but at console price-points, with console-level reliability and ease of use.

Do you really think that Sony will be able to keep it at console price points? I'll believe it when I see it. I'm willing to bet that we will also see an increase in console pricing.

I have the Sony PS4 so that I can play and share games with my Brother-in-law. But anything that I want to play in high definition graphics, such as Far Cry or Fallout, I buy for the PC. There is just no getting around the fact that as soon as these consoles have their hardware specs set, they are out of date. For the same price as a new console, I can buy a new video card for my PC that will give me at least 4x the performance.

Long story short, there isn't any benefit for me to upgrade to the new console. I'll be definitely skipping this one.

Re: I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

The Angels weep for your comment.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Dutch Gun]

Frame rate is a complicated beast, depending on the *worst* performing aspect among many. But for graphics rendering, you absolutely do need shader computational ability proportional to the numbers of pixels on the screen. A fragment / pixel shader is a tiny program that's executed on every pixel, every frame. There's no getting around that requirement, except by reducing the complexity of the shaders as much as you can.

Another bottleneck when increasing screen size is memory buffers used for off-screen processing. Nearly all games I know of use at least a couple of offscreen buffers, for various effects. These screen effects also have to be processed on each pixel, and the memory requirements increase enormously when the resolution increases. You've often heard of games that use buffers that are actually *smaller* than the final resolution for intermediate processing, and then scale the output to the final resolution. A lack of memory and GPU horsepower is why they're forced to do this - they have to make some tradeoff between shader complexity and raw resolution.

So, if this is intended to do VR, it makes sense that the GPU has been significantly boosted, as most of the heavy requirements fall on that side of the system, from what I understand. It's likely the CPU is boosted simply because they have an opportunity to do so for roughly the same requirements as the original, so that will just be a bonus.

Personally, I don't think these consoles will do 4K gaming. They'll probably do 4K video and will finally have the horsepower to do true 1K resolution videogames as well as VR of some sort.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[xgerrit]

Do you really think that Sony will be able to keep it at console price points? I'll believe it when I see it. I'm willing to bet that we will also see an increase in console pricing.

Strictly from a business standpoint, it makes sense for there to be two-tiers of PS4s. Having a high-end and a low-end does a better job of capturing money from different segments of the market. By creating a console for 4K TVs (and remember it doesn't have to do 4K to look better on 4K TVs), they've created a product that is targeted at customers who are willing to spend extra money to have the latest and greatest. So the Neo is almost certainly going to cost more than what people expect of consoles.

Over time as the price of 4K TVs and the Neo drops, it will become the low-end console and they'll release a new high-end version. By keeping one aspect of the PS4 eco-system aspirational, they increase the desire for and value of the PS4 overall.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[xgerrit]

No, you certainly are not a graphics expert. I am not either, but at least I know that scenes are not composed and rendered for each pixel. So, when you go from 1080p to 720p which has 2.25 times less pixels, you never get 2.25 times more frame rate. It depends heavily on the game of course but at best you get something less than 2x, while at worse something like a 25% frame rate benefit.

Actually you can get a much higher frame-rate from a small performance boost depending on the game. Generally you have a fixed amount of time to draw a picture, so if you miss the mark by only a little bit, you only need a little bit of extra power to not miss the mark. This is why many modern engines slightly decrease the resolution when they know their drawing is going to come in slightly late.

A console that's twice as powerful, really should be able to have twice the frame rate at the same resolution. BUT, I doubt that's what most developers will choose. The public cares less about 60fps than hardcore gamers think. By increasing the resolution to something above 1080p, the picture will clearly look better on 4K TVs. (Remember: The picture doesn't have to be the full 4K to look better on a 4K TV.) A much sharper, clearer picture at a solid 30 fps is more marketable than the same 1080p picture at 60 fps.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because video game consoles are weak pieces of shit intended for children and idiots. Always have been, always will be.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Most existing games probably won't benefit since they are hardcoded to the original PS4 specs and their framerates are locked. Yet another downfall of console-centric development. It doesn't allow for scalable games.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I would disagree that it makes sense to have to different tiers, it is very short thing thinking.

As someone mentioned the graphics and cpu capability of consoles is already out of date (compared to a modern PC) the moment the specs are released, it will then take another 2 years before the console is actually released, and 5 more years before a new console is announced.

That means that a console has to live for at least 7 years and be extremely under powered. The only reason this is working because there is only one console and games can be optimised specifically for that console. For example making use of parallelism, knowing ahead of time how long each piece of code will execute.

Having more consoles from the same manufacturer that your game has to run on, requires you to write a lot more generic code and slower code or have a lot more developers in the company (this really doesn't scale, you probably need 4 times the number of developers to optimally code for two platforms).

Consoles already have lost the convenience (I spend two weeks optimizing my xbox one console to be able to play rockband 4, because it stutters when networking is enabled), or performance (well every office PC outperforms the current console).

Re:I don't think that's enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's one of the biggest wins in consoles

If you buy a PS4 after the shit Sony pulled with PS3 (other OS installation block), you lose.

Re:I don't think that's enough

[deek]

This link is a list of PS4 games that currently do 1080p@60fps. This is good enough for VR, as reprojection will double that to 120fps for the PSVR headset, and a good indication of what PSVR graphics will be like on the current PS4.

http://www.videogamerplus.com/...

Re:I don't think that's enough

[deek]

Do you really think that Sony will be able to keep it at console price points? I'll believe it when I see it. I'm willing to bet that we will also see an increase in console pricing.

  It's not beyond the realm of possibility that the Neo could be introduced at current console price points. The new gpu will be using ATI's new 14nm FinFET tech, down from 28nm in the current PS4 gpu. That'll make production costs cheaper for each gpu, even with a probable increase in transistor count and percentage failed QA. I really wouldn't be surprised if ATI will sell the gpu at a cheaper cost to Sony than current prices.

  Never mind further cost reduction because the new parts will draw less power, so thermal dispersion and power supply costs can be lowered, thermal design of the new system need not be as stringent as well.

  I believe that Sony have found themselves in the strange position of being able to lower hardware costs by increasing performance. Their quandary was, do they artificially limit the power of the new systems, or do they provide a two-tier console performance structure for this generation? Looks like they've gone for the second option.

  Of course, they'll likely sell the Neo at an increased price, but I think they'll start off at the original PS4 price point. Eventually, they'll run out stock of older PS4 units, and then move the Neo price down to the current level.

Just return to a self assembly PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shit, those only "that console" games...

On Par

[dohzer]

So will it be on par with PC graphic? If not, let me know when consoles catch up.

Re:On Par

[sg_oneill]

So will it be on par with PC graphic? If not, let me know when consoles catch up.

Well no, obviously not. With the current generation 1080s and the like theres no comparison. But the consoles are not for the PC Master Race. They are for folks who want to hook up an affordable game box to their TV set and blap bad guys with friends over beer and pizza.

And anyway, tuning games to be able to perform well on the consoles buys us a whole lot of free optimizations that make the PC versions scream along at high speeds and res

Re:On Par

[arth1]

And anyway, tuning games to be able to perform well on the consoles buys us a whole lot of free optimizations that make the PC versions scream along at high speeds and res

But tuning games to be able to perform well on consoles also means completely screwing up control latency and accuracy. The rubber band controlled movement requires optimization because of all the extra frames and smoothing, and it ends up being more sluggish than a pure PC twitch game.

Until consoles get controls where the user controls the full speed of movement, and not only the direction and low speeds, this will always be the case - more frames rendered, and more power spent on animation and smoothing instead of twitching between stills.

Re:On Par

[Nemyst]

Rumors peg it at about RX480 level, probably a bit lower (power/heat constraints and all that). That's "on par" with the middle ground recent PC. A 1080 (and probably the Vega stuff AMD will eventually release) will trounce that easily, let alone SLI/Crossfire.

Re:On Par

[Mashiki]

Rumors peg it at about RX480 level, probably a bit lower (power/heat constraints and all that). That's "on par" with the middle ground recent PC. A 1080 (and probably the Vega stuff AMD will eventually release) will trounce that easily, let alone SLI/Crossfire.

Doubtful. I'll wait to see the actual specs, but I'll bet it'll be in the range of a 2yr old mid-range PC. The PS4 and Xbox one were both the equivalent of 5 year old PC's at release. The reality is consoles are always behind at least a couple of years if not more even when it's "top of the line."

Re:On Par

[BigBuckHunter]

It will be twice as fast as the current PS4... This means it will be exactly half as fast as it needs to be for 4K gaming.

Re:On Par

[Yvan256]

Well my PC graphics are powered by an nVidia GT 630 so they're already more than on-par with them!

Re:On Par

[Blaskowicz]

The average PC has Intel graphics or an old midrange or low end graphics card. In fact the average new PC is likely behind that 5 year old top of the line PC.

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

this is true. Even in 1991 an average 386 was way behind all those 486 enthosiasts on Tsengs.

Re:On Par

[Mashiki]

The average PC has Intel graphics or an old midrange or low end graphics card. In fact the average new PC is likely behind that 5 year old top of the line PC.

Your average intel graphics card and low-end card can easily pull the same settings that consoles do. Not at the same fidelity, but they can pull 720p and 902p which are what both console use at medium settings in many cases.

Re:On Par

[aliquis]

The average PC yes.
The average PC gamer doesn't have RX 480 performance either.

However the RX 480 is having the graphical performance of about one of the most bought graphics cards for those who built new machines for gaming.

I guess the PS4 Neo may end up performing just above RX 480. What's interesting is that they are shooting for 4K, are accepting lower resolutions but not as low as WQHD and also demand higher frame-rates than the PS4 1080p or lower resolution version of the game. To get close to or 4K performance out of the a 6 gflops card you need to do something intelligent and I can only assume that will help with performance on the PC too.

Personally I wonder if I should pick up a used i7 2600K rather than an i7 6700K since it cost like 1/4 as much and perform 1/4 worse ..

Re:On Par

[u16084]

Pretty Much, My master friends always throw mods, and joysticks at me... "Cortana - Xbox on, Cortona - Start Destiny" while i hold a beer in one hand, and pizza in the other.. and plop down on the couch... Sure you can rig up your pc for a couch scenario, But then, I would have to put my beer down to mess with the wireless keyboard/mouse, thus, limiting more beer room on the coffee table.. It just never ends with PC's, that GPU you bought 6 months ago for $1,000, well, the other guys released a better card for $300 as you weep. Console owners just really dont care .. IN n OUT and back to RL, "Cortana - Goto Sleep"

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

on par with an RX 480, underclocked from 1120 to 911.

an RX 480 can be had for 200$. The rest of the computer can also be had for 200$, but Windows costs 100$. If this costs less than 500$, it still won't be worth it, because that PC is upgradable.

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurpa PC master race derp.

Amazingly adults don’t really care to brag about graphics horsepower, they’d really just like to unwind and enjoy games.

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

Your average intel graphics card and low-end card can easily pull the same settings that consoles do

No, not even close. Intel’s top end HD GPUs are still extremely underpowered. Definitely good enough for the average user though.

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a Tseng Labs ET3000 in my 386. Then again, I also had a USR Courier Dual Standard and a Roland MT-32 on it too.

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

PCs have had voice command for decades.

You're just a Johnny-come-lately plebe. What is new to you is quaint to us.

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

Adults are intelligent and capable enough to control every aspect and get the perfect gaming setup.

Children play console games.

Re:On Par

[Mashiki]

Yeah really close. The average GPU on both the xbox one and PS4 count in the 680-900Gflops range. The average IntelHD card is in the 500-900Gflops range. Not talking about the combination APU/CPU/GPU stuff, straight up graphics processing power. Oh and that's from the last 4 years on those IntelHD integrated graphics chips. You enjoy that reality. Those consoles are low-powered PC's and any type of reality that they're not comes crashing down when real numbers come into play.

Re:On Par

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest Intel GPUs are actually quite capable, about on par with Geforce 750M or Radeon M270X.

It's not too late...

[underqualified]

...to call it PlayStation 4K!

Makes sense

[rasmusbr]

Weren't these exact specs going through the console gaming news cycle some 2-3 months ago? I believe this is the OFA: http://www.giantbomb.com/artic...

But yes, this makes a lot of sense for Sony. It is not going to be technologically feasible to release a gaming system with at least 10x more GPU power than the original PS4 within the foreseeable future. Certainly not at a reasonable price point. It is feasible to do a 2x upgrade next year because the PS4 was somewhat underpowered to begin with. Then there could easily be another 2x upgrade sometime in the early 2020's.

(Yes, we are less than three and a half years away from the early 2020's. Sounds a little implausible, doesn't it?)

I think the PS4 series of consoles is likely to be Sony's final non-portable gaming system. One of Nvidia, Intel and AMD will probably be the company that pioneers the truly next generation of gaming consoles, which will require truly radical change in how GPU:s are made.

Re:Makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is not remotely interested in gaming consoles, and would never partner with AMD anyway.

Re:Makes sense

[rasmusbr]

Intel is not remotely interested in gaming consoles, and would never partner with AMD anyway.

Intel is no doubt in search of a new area of focus. So that could change.

Intel will probably not want to license technology from AMD, but they might at some point buy AMD and chop it up for parts.

Re:Makes sense

[tepples]

Intel is not remotely interested in gaming consoles

Not even a Skylake NUC running Steam in Big Picture mode?

Re:Makes sense

[Kjella]

Intel is no doubt in search of a new area of focus. So that could change. Intel will probably not want to license technology from AMD, but they might at some point buy AMD and chop it up for parts.

Intel doesn't want AMD to actually fail, just be failing like they've been the last decade. If nobody else could supply x86 processors they'd have to work a lot harder to avoid anti-trust problems. The console business is low margin, you can tell that by AMDs financials despite powering every console of this generation and not at all the kind of market Intel is looking for. Heck, at this point I'm not surprised if they intentionally priced themselves out of the Playstation Neo / Xbox Scorpio to keep AMD on life support. They can read quarterly earnings reports as well as anybody, Thursday we'll see their Q2 results and I expect them to be circling the drain this quarter too. The RX 480 looks like it might put food on the table but that won't be until Q3.

And even if Zen is a massive success, AMD is still so on the ropes it'll take a long time to recover. What Intel would like is the phone/tablet/convertible space but for once the WinTel combo has failed and Apple/Google don't need x86, not sure what direction Intel's heading but tablet sales have fallen and PCs rebounded lately so it might not be that urgent anyway. Particularly since the plans for ARM servers seem to have lost steam, Intel is still making bank selling Xeons. They're clearly a bit on the defensive, but hey... I'd be more worried about the console companies themselves as they start to mimic PCs more and more. Well maybe not Microsoft as they have the PC gaming market but Sony and Nintendo, at this point unless they have a real winner I think Nintendo should concentrate on software like Pokemon Go. Yes, using Super Mario to sell consoles worked a while but I think they'd do just as well selling it for its own sake.

Re:Makes sense

[rasmusbr]

Yeah, Nintendo has seen that their audience has gone over to mobile gaming. There is probably no point in trying to fight that.

By the way Nintendo and Niantic may finally have found a way to prompt Apple and Samsung to put bigger batteries in their phones. Games like Pokemon GO where you keep your screen on will suck the battery dry in 2-3 hours on most phones.

Re:Makes sense

[aliquis]

AMD seem to just want to use more GPUs.

Re:Makes sense

[xgerrit]

I think the PS4 series of consoles is likely to be Sony's final non-portable gaming system. One of Nvidia, Intel and AMD will probably be the company that pioneers the truly next generation of gaming consoles, which will require truly radical change in how GPU:s are made.

This makes no sense. The PS Vita is not selling well, but the PS4 is. If they give up on a platform, it's going to be mobile. Home consoles aren't going anywhere. People are still going to own TVs and want to play on the couch, and VR, because of it's nature, is not going to mobile in the foreseeable future. VR will require physical space setup for playing and power that's just not available in mobile devices. Sony's already made it clear they're committed to VR, so unless you think VR is destined to be a total flop, the only thing that makes sense is that Sony's going to be making more home consoles.

The console wars are back!

[Lumpy]

This is awesome, I really hope we start another console war of technology jumps every year and real innovation this time. Xbox360/PS3 was boring as hell. I want to see a console that will run the new Unity Engine at a full 4 K at 120fps and maxed out on polygons and texture mapping settings.

Re:The console wars are back!

[drinkypoo]

I want to see Steam Machines come down in price, and if more fancy-pants new hardware comes out and drives costs of existing stuff down, then I'm happy. I'm over consoles with proprietary operating systems. I'm not over the moon about Steam DRM but it seems like a massive win compared to being beholden to Sony or Microsoft... or Nintendo for that matter.

Re:The console wars are back!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol. My master, best master!

Re:The console wars are back!

[drinkypoo]

Lol. My master, best master!

The best master is no master, but I'm not in charge of how games are distributed. At least it's possible to buy DRM-free games from Steam. You can't do that on any console.

Re:The console wars are back!

[sad_]

one of the best things about a steam machine is that it is as expensive as you want it to be.
you can build one, cheap as dirt and it will be just fine for a lot of games. certainly if you are into indie gaming, for example.
or you could go nuts and spend a few thousand €/$ on one.
the choice is yours.

Not Enough Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

1080p to 4K is x4 the pixels, therefore a performance of x4 not x2.3 is required.
So you will be able to play the same game at 4K res but roughly half the performance.

Or am I missing something?

Re: Not Enough Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's to say the capability of the hardware doing 1080P didn't have headroom to do more, so you'd only need a 2.5x performance boost to handle 4x the pixels?

Re: Not Enough Performance

[tshawkins]

1080p to 1080p VR is only 2x though, and probaly more relevant.

Analog stick > WASD

[tepples]

Until consoles get controls where the user controls the full speed of movement, and not only the direction and low speeds

An analog stick controls speed of movement by how far the stick is tilted from center. WASD is like a D-pad: either a key is pressed or it isn't. That's why some games for PlayStation 3 and 4 let the player plug in a USB mouse, use the mouse to control aiming, and use the DualShock's left stick to control movement.

Quiet console

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd buy it tomorrow if it could just manage 1080p games without the fan inside making it sounding like a fighter jet...

Re:Quiet console

[Bert64]

Just play a flight simulator then you get to enjoy the realistic sound effects...

Re:Quiet console

[HornWumpus]

It's warning you that you are about to be jumped. Listen to the fan.

Re: Quiet console

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully The Neo won't have a fan like the loud 1st edition of the Ps4.

#NotAllGames are pixel shader bound

[tepples]

Pixel shaders probably do take four times longer to render at twice the pixel density, with texture caching perhaps mitigating a bit of that. But not all games are pixel shader bound. With geometry, you can usually get away with less than x4. This is especially true of games whose art style isn't "brown" enough to need photoreal shading, especially games as stylized as Nintendo's first-party games.

Re:#NotAllGames are pixel shader bound

[Anonymous Coward]

After 17 years in the games industry as a graphics programmer I will say I haven't seen a game with fragment shaders that isn't bound by their performance. Sure, game with a 2D flat look generally won't be fragment bound but any game that wants any sort of realism will keep adding to the fragment shaders until the hardware is just fast enough to render it acceptably. At least with 4K you can turn down the antiailasing a bit.

There is simply never enough GPU power.

I'm out of the games biz now but if I wanted to go from 1080p to 4K with VR on the horizon I'd prefer 10x performance minimum. Too bad Sony likes to fuck over the programmers with generally shitty hardware.

Re:#NotAllGames are pixel shader bound

[tepples]

I'm out of the games biz now but if I wanted to go from 1080p to 4K with VR on the horizon I'd prefer 10x performance minimum. Too bad Sony likes to fuck over the programmers with generally shitty hardware.

Is Nintendo's or Microsoft's or Apple's any less shitty? Or are GPUs for the mass market just not ready for 4K yet?

PC first, consoles later

[tepples]

But in the end, fuck consoles. They are holding back PC game development.

How so? A developer can choose to target PC first and then streamline the game later for a port to consoles. It worked for SimCity and The Sims and Skyrim and Diablo 3.

Re:PC first, consoles later

[Anonymous Coward]

A developer can choose to target PC first and then streamline the game later for a port to consoles. It worked for SimCity and The Sims and Skyrim and Diablo 3.

Porting Skyrim to PS3 didn't really work. If you do a quick search you will find several posts from angry users. Apart from that, console users are missing on all the modding that is only possible on the PC version.

Games already cut back to 900p

[tepples]

Who's to say the capability of the hardware doing 1080P didn't have headroom to do more

Though PlayStation 4 has 1080p on a lot of games where Xbox One needs to upscale, several PlayStation 4 games still end up running at 900p on PS4, such as Battlefield 4 . But what you say about headroom is likely for any game that's 1080p on both consoles.

Re:PS4 XBone

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha you're a fucking idiot. Why do you think PC exclusives that will never go near a console don't look like the second coming of christ, as they should according to the logic of you PC masturbators?

Because the only thing holding back the PC is the fragmented PC market itself, games are crippled by the need to make everything scalable across the infinite number of configurations and specs that are out there. It's only BECAUSE of consoles that you're getting most of the triple-A games you're getting at this polished quality. Many publishers wouldn't even spare the kind of huge budgets they do if the PC was the only platform available. PC has its own cancer, consoles are the chemotherapy keeping it from dying.

4K my ass

[Nemyst]

Current PS4 games regularly use a sub-1080p resolution to manage around 30 fps. 2.3x that performance will not give you 4K unless you make extremely large fidelity concessions, and that's still just for 30 fps, which is awful. Even PCs struggle with 4K so I don't expect to see that being used on consoles for anything other than movies.

Re:4K my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even PCs struggle with 4K"

Not when rendering the graphics quality you commonly see on consoles. Don't mention PCs alongside as consoles. They are not comparable, it's unfair. since the ps4 was launched, nvidia has gone up from the 6xx series, through 7xx, 9xx and recently released the 10xx series. AMD went from GCN gen 1 through 2, 3 and now the r9 4xx series uses gcn 4. "Twice the performance", even if reached in actual gameplay, compared to hardware 3 years old is silly.

Re:4K my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange how you don't hear PC gamers complaining BluRay films are nigh on unwatchable at 1080p 30fps......

Well actually it isn't, ramming more pickles onto the screen has long been a faux fidelity crutch for how poorly the render pipline simulates a real optical system. I'd much rather see a shift towards oversampling and exposure simulation at much lower resolutions than keep waking down this dead end road. What are we going to do when games hit 8k @ 90+ fps and finally and unequivocally exceed the capabilities of human vision. They'll still look like games, bump maps will still just be bump maps, occlusion culling will still be ersatz ray-tracing and textures even at arbitrarily high gear-porn watercooled quad SLI resolutions will still just be bitmaps scaled, translated, and painted onto a bunch of culled quads.

Re:4K my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

And history has shown sony always get it spot on, even if at the time it might not seem like it.

PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 all outsold amd out performed the competition.

Re:4K my ass

[Nemyst]

A movie is watchable at 24 fps (not 30) because of motion blur, and even then, many movies suffer from it, especially 3D movies. You'd want 60 fps at least for a smooth experience which isn't entirely reliant on motion blur.

The rest of your comment is just a stream of nonsense. Ray tracing isn't any more special than rasterization, and movies make extensive use of textures and nobody bats an eye.

Re:4K my ass

[Nemyst]

*cough* The PS3 was soundly beat by the Wii, actually, and very much traded blows with the 360. Only the PS1 and 2 were a runaway success.

Re:4K my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of us that use motion interpolation to bring 24fps movies up to a reasonable 60fps. It's even a built-in feature in modern smart TVs.

"Leaked" press release

[fustakrakich]

Neat advertising gimmick to make it on the front page. Works every time...

Re:Analog stick WASD

[aliquis]

I don't understand why no-one has made an analog "keyboard" yet to solve exactly that.

Maybe not a 105 key one but one with some keys at-least, 20?

Will it be able to compete with the Scorpio?

[BionicGecko]

Those specs seems a little weak; the PS4's GPU can push 1.84 teraflops. 2.3 times that gives you just above 4, which is 33% slower than Microsoft's own upcoming revision of their Xbox One (codenamed Scorpio and rated at 6 teraflops). Well, if we can trust Microsoft, that is.

On the other hand, the Neo is rumoured to come out this October, while the Scorpio won't be around until at least fall 2017.

Interesting times!

Re:PS4 XBone

[Voyager529]

I only see one idiot here. I'm guessing you're either too young to remember the early days of PC gaming, or you simply forgot because of the past decade of Apple lauding their monoculture as a panacea.

In the late 80's and early 90's, fragmentation was a bit more of a problem. Going from the internal PC speaker to actual audio cards was a mess, with games needing code written for several popular cards, until we ended up with "Sound Blaster Compatible" becoming the de facto standard before Windows 95 gave us a universal abstraction layer that works well enough that offboard/external audio cards are either for enthusiasts (there's still a few sound blaster cards floating around Newegg) or audio professionals (Tascam/Presonus/M-Audio/Rane).

In the early days of graphics cards, games once again frequently needed code for individual GPUs. Grab a copy of "Forsaken" off eBay and you'll have to specify whether you have a TNT2 card, 3dfx card, and one or two others. Again, this was commonplace until DirectX and OpenGL provided an intermediate solution that allowed game designers to target the abstraction layer, rather than the hardware.

Now, things have gotten even simpler on the PC side, because developers don't even necessarily have to write code to DirectX, but because they can code to the engines - Unity, Unreal, Source, Crytek, or in-house ones like Frostbite. Code to the engine, and the engine worries about ensuring DirectX compatibility, which in turn worries about hardware.

Finally, cross-platform development has brought its own cancers to the PC side. I could have a bad encounter with a table saw and still be able to count on one hand how many AAA games released in the past two years allow for dedicated servers. Console folk can't be bothers to configure port forwarding on their routers, and to be fair, it's not like consoles work all that great with that paradigm, which is why XBL and PSN exist. I don't begrudge those services in the least, but dedicated servers were a standard component for multiplayer PC games for over a decade, but are now an endangered species. Games used to frequently ship with level editors and modding kits, that allowed for new characters and maps to be community created (DLC used to be DIY, and free). Again, this is a highly exceptional state of affairs now, and I'm patently unconvinced it's a positive direction for PC gaming.

So yeah, there are near-infinite hardware variations. There are also time-tested methods of addressing them.

4k is only diuble 1080p not 4 times.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you all lost your minds? 4k = 2160p. I suck ay math but that is not 4x 1080p......

Ignoring the standard height naming convention and using the width instead does not make it 4x the resolution it makes you an idiot for falling for marketing misdirection.

Re: 4k is only diuble 1080p not 4 times.

[Anonymous Coward]

The width is also doubled in 4k you idiot.

Re: 4k is only diuble 1080p not 4 times.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that guy is trolling

GAMEPLAY over pixels.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it means abandoning recently purchased consoles they can stow it. Nobody wants to buy a new console every month because it has a new screen resolution. The PS4 framerate is great and good game play.

Re:PS4 XBone

[Kjella]

Finally, cross-platform development has brought its own cancers to the PC side. I could have a bad encounter with a table saw and still be able to count on one hand how many AAA games released in the past two years allow for dedicated servers. (...) dedicated servers were a standard component for multiplayer PC games for over a decade, but are now an endangered species. Games used to frequently ship with level editors and modding kits, that allowed for new characters and maps to be community created (DLC used to be DIY, and free). Again, this is a highly exceptional state of affairs now, and I'm patently unconvinced it's a positive direction for PC gaming.

I'm quite sure the first one got nothing to do with being "cross-platform" and everything do with control. The market that doesn't have an always-on/cheap/reliable Internet connection has dwindled to the point where they don't care and by tying everything to central services they have control both over piracy and swinging the ban hammer. Any major organized LAN party will have a fat pipe to the Internet, heck if I wanted to pay $1750/month I could have 10 Gbps fiber at home today. I'd agree more with modding, there consoles have pretty strongly pushed the "one gaming experience for everyone" model. That said, not many games have the simple "LEGO block" model where you can just puzzle things together and have it work anymore. I do remember the games that had it, but I also remember the limitations and many games that didn't but were fun then and there even though they lacked the replay value.

All locked down

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten million horsepower, all locked down. If you want to use it for your own use, we offer 1.5, 3.1 and 4.8 horsepower. 4.8 Horsepower ought to be enough for anyone. If you make like GeoHot and try to bypass our limits, then your PS4 comes back to us along with a huge wackload of stuff that didn't belong to us before, but we will come to your house, kick down the door and grab anyway. Its the most walled of walled gardens. Its not an IOT appliance. Its sole purpose is to make Sony and/or NVIDIA money. Thanks for playing.

Re:Analog stick WASD

[nanoflower]

They do have that. It's perhaps not as fine a control as with the joystick but it's a finer control than on/off that you get with most keyboards. It just costs a good deal.

Re:Analog stick WASD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey tepples, is your current email address still tepples@gmail.com? I was able to obtain that gay porn collection you wanted to buy. We'll work out the details by email.

Take care buddy.

Re:Analog stick WASD

[Anonymous Coward]

My old Saitek Pro Gamer Command Unit does have an analogue thumbstick.

You could also just use an Xbox 360 controller + mouse.

PS4 Leak

[Anonymous Coward]

PS NEO spec leaks, finally something to work with, I am getting updates for it here
http://www.liovinci.com/i/playstation-neo - do not worry ps4 owners games will be released for both the neo and ps4 still

Re:Analog stick WASD

[aliquis]

The 360 controller isn't made to be used with one hand though.

It would better be some joystick with multiple buttons for the fingers or whatever. But I think a four button layout for directions is ok too but they could be analog.

Maybe something like a flater trackball with buttons around it?

But well, maybe joystick with buttons for all fingers are best combined with mouse, one got room for lots of buttons on the mouse too anyway.

Re:Analog stick WASD

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why no-one has made an analog "keyboard" yet to solve exactly that.

Maybe not a 105 key one but one with some keys at-least, 20?

Like a Logitech g13?

That's exactly what it is...

Re:Analog stick WASD

[aliquis]

Like a Logitech g13?

That's exactly what it is...

It's totally not an analog keyboard. It's a keyboard with an analog joystick for the thumb.

I meant analog WASD input so you for instance didn't had to hit the walk key (or crouch) and change the outcome like that but rather could just push down the key a little to walk slowly.

I'm not sure the thumb joystick is as precise, maybe it is.

I assume there's some joysticks with buttons on the shaft too.
http://img.directindustry.com/...
https://flyawaysimulation.com/...

Games would of course also need to either have native support or mappaple support for it.