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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.
I can't wait to play Pokemon Go on it in 4k.
So will it be on par with PC graphic? If not, let me know when consoles catch up.
...to call it PlayStation 4K!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neat advertising gimmick to make it on the front page. Works every time...
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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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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Or maybe not. How many current PS4 games get 60fps at 1080p?
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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.
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.
Just play a flight simulator then you get to enjoy the realistic sound effects...
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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.
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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.
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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.
1080p to 1080p VR is only 2x though, and probaly more relevant.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
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.
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.
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Games would of course also need to either have native support or mappaple support for it.