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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.
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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?
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
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.
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"