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Microsoft and Sony Are Debating Over Whose Console Really Offers 'True 4K' (arstechnica.com)
Sony's PlayStation 4, which will go on sales in two months, comes loaded with rendering pipeline and some proprietary upscaling techniques that can improve lower resolution base signals to take fuller advantage of a 4K display. Microsoft is seemingly upset with how Sony is marketing this, and it is not shying from telling people that no amount of upscaling can fill in those missing 4K pixels and the hardware inefficiency to produce native and "true 4K" images that the Project Scorpio, its gaming console that is coming next year can. Microsoft has also said that any game that it will launch during the Scorpio timeframe will "natively render at 4K." But the debate is anything from over because Microsoft keeps reminding everyone that the processor and GPU in its upcoming console is more powerful. As ArsTechnica explains: With Scorpio, Microsoft seems to be arguing that every first-party game at launch will be able to generate and render nearly 8.3 million pixels (four times as many as a 1080p game) at an acceptable frame rate (i.e., at least 30 times a second). That would be quite an achievement. As we noted back at E3, it currently takes pricey, high-end PC graphics cards like the Nvidia GTX 1080 or the AMD R9 Fury X -- cards that run $300 or much higher -- to "barely scrape by" with a native 4K, 30fps game. And those PC cards seem to have significantly more raw power than what is being claimed by Microsoft -- 9 and 8.4 teraflops, respectively, vs. a claimed 6 teraflops for Scorpio (and 4.2 teraflops for the PS4 Pro).Microsoft's head of Xbox planning, Albert Penello said, "I know that 4.2 teraflops is not enough to do true 4K." In an interview with Eurogamer, Penello adds:I think there are a lot of caveats they're giving customers right now around 4K. They're talking about checkerboard rendering and up-scaling and things like that. There are just a lot of asterisks in their marketing around 4K, which is interesting because when we thought about what spec we wanted for Scorpio, we were very clear we wanted developers to take their Xbox One engines and render them in native, true 4K. That was why we picked the number, that's why we have the memory bandwidth we have, that's why we have the teraflops we have, because it's what we heard from game developers was required to achieve native 4K.
... the question on everyone's minds is, "why can't they both lose?"
Penis length comparison, rather.
Seriously, anyone giving a shit about higher resolution? What I care about is sensible gameplay and fun. You remember fun? Try to put it back into games and I'll bother buying some again.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Meanwhile most console gamers have already picked a side and will probably just upgrade whichever system they've already invested in.
This seems like a lot of whining from Microsoft considering they marketed the XBOX 360 as a 1080p machine, though almost all the games rendered in 720p (the PS3 had many more games rendering in higher resolutions that generation). Since the PS4 Pro will play 4K video and render at higher than 1080p (then do some extrapolation tricks), I’d say Sony can call it a 4K Box.
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Are there going to be enough people out there with 4k systems to take advantage?
I don't think so, but I haven't studied the numbers close enough to say one way or another...
I will say that 4k came too quickly after 1080p for me, and I'm the kind of person who they are targeting, since I have disposable income and a house big enough to use a 4k screen.
I currently have a 70" Sony 1080p TV, very nice home theater setup... I'm not feeling any reason to go to 4k, and yes, I know what 4k looks like, I just don't care...
It requires spending a ton of money that I can spend somewhere else, changing the setup that I'm used to, etc.
1080p was needed, 4k is "meh"...
Not many people have 4k sets, HDR isn't standardized, and by the time things get sorted out and these end up in peoples' homes, the next generation will be upon us and ready to fully exploit 4k.
4K TVs are outselling 1080p ones. HDR may not be standardised but from a console perspective once it has been it can be resolved by a simple firmware update.
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The sony console cant play 4k blurays. INSTANT PASS. and ive been ps since the ps2 (dvd). and the ps3 (bluray)
None of these consoles is actually 4K.
The term "4K" is originally the name of a cinema standard, which has 4096*2160 pixels.
A 4K image is either 4096 pixels wide or 2160 pixels high (or both), but a 4K screen must have the full 4096*2160 to be compliant to the standard.
The television standard's real name is "Ultra High Definition", abbreviated as "Ultra-HD" or "UHD". It is only 3840*2160.
Some 4K images do fit inside that, but not all. A UHD screen is therefore not a 4K screen.
A "4K TV" is just a marketing term to sell UHD TVs, because it is in the "same order of magnitude as 4K" or "about the same as 4K".
Real 4K monitors do exist, but they are often very expensive, and they also tend to have better support for the colour space in the cinema standard.
The only somewhat affordable screen I know of that is 4096 pixels wide is the one inside of the late 2015 21.5" Apple iMac, at 4096*2304 pixels. It even has support for cinema colour space.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
But call me when you can render a moving scene in 4K VIDEO at a minimum of 40 FPS with varying lighting sources and textures that make use of that resolution. Doing all this while keeping up with the necessary game play and physics modeling to make what I'm seeing somewhat realistic....
/sarc off
Seriously, who cares what the physical hardware is capable of displaying in some static test image, it's about being able to model the game play realistic enough and fast enough to be believable while showing a related visual representation of the same without having the user's subconscious be nagging them that something's not right... So where it is obviously better to have higher resolution, if you don't have the ability to use that resolution though lack of horse power, memory bandwidth etc, it doesn't matter.
Comparing raw video resolution is a fools game. It's all for marketing. Sort of like the idiots who somehow claim they can actually hear the difference between 0.1 and 0.01 % THD in their home stereos... Looks good on paper, but you might as well start a fire with that marketing brochure.
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This is pretty much what many reviewers and gamers point out every time a game is released on both platforms. Inevitably, someone always points out that the game runs at 1080p on the PS4 but only at 900p or 720p on Xbox One, if only to validate that they made the "right choice" with their platform purchase.
This reminds me of other kids arguing over whether the TurboGrafx 16 was a 'real' 16-bit console or not. Turns out the '16' was only a part of the American name, it was called the PC Engine in Japan and France, and the TurboGrafx elsewhere.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
it's just the chicken-or-the-egg problem in regards to Linux support for games.
Well, given the current repertoire available for Linux on Steam :
it's more like there a giant flock of tiny hummingbirds who are happily laying eggs all together in Linux nest.
Only a couple of huge ostriches are too smug to lay their giant eggs there, or are only able to lay hideously deformed linux eggs.
There are currently thousands of Linux games on Steam. Most are indie games.
Of the triple A big studios, only a few run on engines that already have good Linux ports (hi, Ryan Gordon !)
The rest are either doing extremely crappy ports relying on aweful middle-ware for the windows-to-unix adaptation,
or completely ignore the non-Windows/non-DirectX market.
----
That's a gap that Vulkan could eventually close one day:
unlike the OpenGL vs DirectX opposition, Vulkan is the same API everywhere.
Including Windows, including Linux, including other hardware.
Also, Vulkan *drivers* are much lower-level and simpler than OpenGL or DirectX (because most of the advanced management is moved out of the driver and into the game engine. That's the whole point of giving low-level access to the devs : to help them have better control on the hardware by letting them handle all the small management details) - that also means that the Linux world can produce Vulkan drivers at a faster pace with less bugs (see the fully open-source RADV driver for Radeon hardware). Less playing "catching up" than current OpenGL revision in Mesa or DirectX compatibility layers in Wine.
And for game makers, it means most of the heavy optimisation done in the game engines (and these are going to be much heavier optimisation due to the bigger role played by game engines) can be leveraged much more easily on anything running Vulkan (that includes Linux and Valve's SteamBoxen) than used to be before (where a DirectX-developped game engine needed to be ported to whatever runs on the port target. Means usually rewriting the engine to run on some PlayStation's low-level API. And a Mac OS X/Linux port means yet another rewrite to OpenGL)
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