They always say that... then they release a game that runs on both units, but runs garbage on the older one, cause you know, update incentive.
PS4K information (~2x GPU power w/ clock+, new CPU, price, tent. Q1 2017)
- Thread starter OsirisBlack
- Start date
They always say that... then they release a game that runs on both units, but runs garbage on the older one, cause you know, update incentive.
Any trade in program will be done by retailers, just like every other console ever.
EDIT: seeing the DF article perhaps i was wrong, but i still wonder if this creates problems when developing a game that should run on both versions of the console natively. Also, that shitty CPU with ~4tflops? Lmao
What's so difficult to understand? Of course vanilla won't be obsolete. But there will be a (clearly) better option out there and people who buy PS4K will encourage revisions to a point where you'll most definitely have what you said, 'a yearly model' in the coming future. It's exactly what Apple's been doing for years and I'm curious what will developers say about the whole deal - is this situation encouraging them to juice out the current edition or save the best for PS4K? Where's that thin red line? So many logical questions I as a consumer and owner of original PS4 have from the get-go.
Also, immediately dump at least one of those three years, cause we're just hitting new milestones... like these days. We had Witcher 3, Bloodborne, TPP... that's about it? One of those was cross-gen as well. From purely technical standpoint: Killzone Shadowfall and Order 1886?
MisterR
Member
GameStop will be happy to give you 200 for your PS4 in trade value towards a PS4k, I'm sure. They are doing it right now towards a trade for new PS4's and Xbox Ones. Lots of families will be happy to pick it up at a discounted rate.
Not sure an upgrade option is necessary. GameStop will probably have a deal, though.
jeff_rigby
Banned
I guess the NEO in the Giant Bomb piece is referring to NeoGAF and it's making fun of NeoGAF.
This is the main reason why I never really wanted to jump into discussions about either the PS4K or NX. It all just seems too soon and/or crazy for these things to happen, especially if 14FF is involved. My initial thoughts were that if a new PS4 is coming this year, it had to be either a "slim" version or maybe a die shrink with the necessary I/O updates and whatnot. An entirely new chip on a new node just seemed a bit much to me.
AMD are currently working their asses off to get anything on that node out the door as soon as possible. We're looking at two Polaris chips in a few months, two Vega chips by the end of the year (although we don't know who's making these yet) and Zen is supposed to arrive late 2016/early 2017. That's a lot of work for a struggling company.
I know that these kinds projects take years and those designs are long finished, so at this point it mostly comes down to GloFo. I just don't know if they will have the capacity to deliver all those things on the same node in what seems a short amount time.
I could be totally wrong and I'd be happy to be surprised though. The biggest question now is: when?
yeah, codename Morpheus was totally a joke too.
Negotiator
Banned
What?!
Adam Tyner
Member
yes!
You're trying to hard. PSVR was codenamed Morpheus. Austin isn't taking a dig at GAF.
Nikodemos
Member
They kinda have to. If they don't, they're dead. Literally.
GloFo have plenty capacity. What they did not have up until recently is a node process worth shit. That's why they straight up bought Samsung's licence for their version of FinFET.
Hip Hop
Member
No, it's not insane. I don't see why Sony or anyone have to offer such thing, and I don't expect them to.
It will be the same thing like they do now, Gamestop and others will offer special trade in values so you can upgrade your console to the new one.
Have you not ever seen this? It's nothing new.
jeff_rigby
Banned
Thanks for the link, so 14nm is possible and economical by the end of this year, amazing. I didn't think that would happen till end of next year.
Custom Sony-AMD Polaris at 14nm.
I truly hate to be wrong but my AMD stock should make me feel better.
Notice the Eurogamer article says the PS4K still has a standard blu-ray drive not version 2. So either that's for compatibility with the Launch PS4 so all games come on 50GB or smaller disks and there never will be UHD blu-ray disk on ANY PS4 including the PS4K or the drive is firmware update-able on all PS4s including Launch versions to read version 2 disks = UHD blu-ray.
https://www.blu-raydisc.info/content-protection/content-protection-rom4.php said:
OsirisBlack
Banned
Good morning so what did I miss?
Theonik
Member
It's a technology sharing initiative so rather than just licensing Samsung's process both are using the same process and share advancements and technology to improve yields across both fabs.
amstradcpc
Member
The cpu upgrade...was finally ditched?.
Theonik
Member
We don't know as Sony isn't saying. What we do know is that they will allow patches and software to support it from Sept/Oct. Based on this the earliest it can come out is then but they appear to imply that software might be made for the device before it's actually released. Considering PSVR is coming October I'd be surprised if they released a new PS4 at the same time. It seems like it would take the spotlight somewhat but it might still make sense if they wish to bundle it.
At any rate to me it would seem they want PSVR software to be able to use that power from the getgo for when they actually launch the thing.
I'll put my gut on a PSX reveal with a Feb release.
e: At least for now. Things might change.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
The thing we all called 'no dice' on, was just that, because there is nothing they can do with the current APU in order for them to upgrade CPU. Zen is not ready yet, and maybe they were hoping it would be, but got the final info from AMD saying, 'it won't be ready in time'.
Tatsumi Oga
Banned
I don't really know a whole lot about specs and everything, but if the new specs are true, how much better than PS4 is it? Some of the comments in these threads are confusing me, some say the upgrade doesn't seem all that big and others say it's like going from PS3 to PS4. The latter would be a generational leap, a huge upgrade. So what is it?
Neither of those is correct.
It's not as a big as a generational leap, but it's no tiny upgrade either.
The co-launch with PSVR is starting to make too much sense to me, and I'm now leaning towards Fall. Plus, didn't the Giant Bomb leak say that developers would be required to have a Neo mode for all games starting in October? That would imply dev kits and tools will be out well before then. Plus, the leaks are so bad that their holiday sales of the old console are already going to take a hit. Seems to make sense to:
Release PSVR in October
Drop price of old PS4
Introduce Neo PS4 in October/November at a higher price point
Then retailers can still sell the old PS4 to price-conscious parents for the holidays, enthusiasts won't have to wait longer to get the new Neo, PSVR/Neo bundle can be made for enthusiasts, and they still have a way to sell the old PS4.
MilkyJoe
Member
Not the latter. I'm not one to lol but that's an L and an O and an L
Negotiator
Banned
Question about the memory bandwidth:
If color compression gives you the equivalent of 40% (correct me if I'm wrong) more memory bandwidth and 218GB/s (GCN 1.2 with color compression) equates to 305GB/s (GCN 1.1 without color compression), then that's a 73% memory BW increase, even though the GPU is 2.3x more powerful. It still seems to be unbalanced.
Am I missing something?
If color compression gives you the equivalent of 40% (correct me if I'm wrong) more memory bandwidth and 218GB/s (GCN 1.2 with color compression) equates to 305GB/s (GCN 1.1 without color compression), then that's a 73% memory BW increase, even though the GPU is 2.3x more powerful. It still seems to be unbalanced.
Am I missing something?
jeff_rigby
Banned
I guess the assumption is that some of the GPU work will GPGPU and less memory intensive.
Negotiator
Banned
GPGPU still needs memory bandwidth.
Also, Jaguar @ 2.1 GHz needs more memory bandwidth as well, right?
Jaguar @ 1.6 GHz (PS4) has 20GB/s of memory BW.
Jaguar @ 1.75 GHz (XB1) has 30GB/s of memory BW.
It just doesn't add up...
Theonik
Member
Kits are going out widely now with a second kit in June I feel it's doubtful they will have mass production by October.
Sony has 3 major PS4 hardware launches in a very short window if that were the case which doesn't seem terribly good.
It's complicated. Colour compression won't always give you the same benefit as it relies that the content can be compressed efficiently which will vary on content.
But even if that were the case a more powerful GPU doesn't necessarily need more bandwidth to feed in the sense that storage needs only to be so fast to feed it but 2x power doesn't mean the card can churn or even needs to churn 2x the data. Bottlenecks there are complicated.
The PS4 GPU is 50% more powerful than the XB1's GPU. This translates into better performance in many case and an almost constant resolution advantage.
The PS4K's GPU is 300% more powerful than XB1's.
That just means a huge upgrade in visuals and IQ, and the CPU upgrade means far more stable framerates than PS4's iterations at worst.
While the bandwidth and CPU constraints will not allow that badass GPU to reach its full potential with current gen games, but it will certainly blow the PS4 and XB1's output out of the park.
Why would they give an increase in the RAM if its only a stopgap console? They would have to completely change the memory units and everything connected with that, for what is essentially just a small investment in power up.
If your PS4 breaks or something happens, your gonna buy a PS4K when it goes down in price, and that's what they are banking on.
It's not Hawaii. First of all, that's too big. Second, R9 290 already has 4 disabled CUs, so it would mean 8 disabled CUs.
DonMigs85
Member
On the other hand the amount of RAM hasn't gone up and the relatively small CPU boost will still hold certain games back.
DonMigs85
Member
Oopsie, the part about memory wasn't there at firstRead my post again
But yeah they're still basically pairing weak Jaguar cores with something closer to a Radeon R9 390 this time. Actually do we know how many ROPs and TMUs are in this thing?
Negotiator
Banned
It's not related to TDP (we're talking about 14nm). Pipeline-wise the Jaguar cannot reach high frequencies (3+ GHz). It's like comparing P3 (short pipeline/low frequency) vs P4 (long pipeline/high frequency).
More like 380. 390 is a 5 Tflops GPU.
This has more to do with the ROPs (32 vs 16) rather than Tflops.
I assume +40% is the best case scenario. It won't happen all the time.
So yeah, it seems to me that this beastly (for console standards) GPU will be heavily bottlenecked. :\ Not to mention the "meh" CPU upgrade... I ain't paying $400 for this shit. Step your game up Sony!
ps: I hope Mark Cerny comes out and explains this weird/unbalanced resource allocation (GPU vs CPU/RAM BW).
jeff_rigby
Banned
As I understand it the Polaris GPU + FinFET has a 2.5 X efficiency over 28nm and older GCN. Only part of this is 14nm FinFET. Of the part that is not, most of it requires the code running on it to use the hardware properly or you don't get the efficiency savings and it gets too hot and has to downclock. This is probably why older PS4 software will see no performance increase, if it tried to use the extra CUs or frequency the APU would get too hot.
The efficiency increase for Polaris designs is partly why it needs less Memory bandwidth than we are all spinning our wheels trying to justify. Yes color compression is a part of it but the GPU registers are handled in a different way more like CPU registers with L3 cache that are instead in GDDR5. This also supports preemption and context switching. It requires very fast memory like GDDR5 and HBM so we will not see a Polaris design in a APU until HBM. Why, because the APUs including the XB1 have to support network standby and they can't use GDDR5 as it's too power hungry. Sony moved the ARM block out of the APU to Southbridge so they could use GDDR5 with the PS4 APU. Because they did so they could upgrade to Polaris earlier than Microsoft can.
Key here is that with the larger faster GDDR5 you can have each wavefront or process have it's own register cache in GDDR5 instead of the smaller one use only register or cache in a GPU. The old way of using GPU registers for each different use of a CU requires copying out what is currently in GPU registers to GDDR5 then copying in new instructions is less efficient that just moving a pointer to a block of GDDR5 that acts as a GPU register. Fewer memory moves means less memory bandwidth is needed, less heat and better context switching.
This was totally predictable in hindsight. Polaris is a 14nm FinFET but could those efficiencies in Polaris be incorporated into a 28nm custom chip with twice the CUs and a frequency bump or did they need to move to FinFET too? I'd always assumed a console would not use a new process till Yields were proven and costs low enough so I assumed no 14nm FinFET Console upgrade in 2016 , it would wait for 2017-2018. IF Polaris 14nm FinFET is in the PS4 NEO then AMD has a winner and we will see cheap midrange 4TF dGPUs from AMD paired up with a Kaveri or Carrizo @ 1 TF for a Gaming PC @ $600 that can support VR. PS4 NEO at $399 has an advantage as the PC games need to be compiled to use Polaris while it can be assumed that all Sony PS4 NEO games already do so.
Sony is going to be selling the Playstation VR goggles to use on PCs, PS4 games will be ported to the PC and SONY is writing a UHD BLu-ray player for the PC. The first two will benefit if the PS4 and PCs are using the same Polaris designs. The latter I'd guess is also for VR media on UHD Blu-ray. Sony is tied to AMD and AMD needs Sony to make popular support for the new efficiencies in Polaris designs. I'd expect Sony to only release the Neo when Polaris is shipping on PCs or to only release UHD BLu-ray on the PS4 when PCs with Kaveri, Carrizo and Polaris dGPUs can support it. That appears to be this October.
Love all the armchair chip engineers here (insert professional title for someone like Mark Cerny here). I'd imagine they know what they're doing and it fits their agenda for what the PS4K's purpose will be.
To me the CPU limitation means games won't runaway from the base PS4 console in terms of what games can come out. So PS4K won't be limited by PS4, and PS4 won't be getting stretched to breaking point running games the PS4K can run fine. People keep assessing this as if it's the PS5 and disappointed it's not more of a true next next-gen console. IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE. It's a mid gen refresh, a PS4'S' if you like. It's meant to run the same OS, same games, and offer some incremental improvements.
It's a premium PS4 experience, NOT a PS5.
PS5 will come in good time, don't worry. As it stands it will offer help to PSVR titles and will improve the overall look and smoothness of most games but it is not a new generation and nobody should be expecting that. It's PS4 games on Ultra settings.
To me the CPU limitation means games won't runaway from the base PS4 console in terms of what games can come out. So PS4K won't be limited by PS4, and PS4 won't be getting stretched to breaking point running games the PS4K can run fine. People keep assessing this as if it's the PS5 and disappointed it's not more of a true next next-gen console. IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE. It's a mid gen refresh, a PS4'S' if you like. It's meant to run the same OS, same games, and offer some incremental improvements.
It's a premium PS4 experience, NOT a PS5.
PS5 will come in good time, don't worry. As it stands it will offer help to PSVR titles and will improve the overall look and smoothness of most games but it is not a new generation and nobody should be expecting that. It's PS4 games on Ultra settings.
Negotiator
Banned
Nobody asked for a PS5.
The problem is that people expected a PS4.5 and all they got is a PS4.25...
CPUs don't have a "fixed" bandwith requirement like GPUs.tapantaola said:
Cell had more than double the computational throughput of PS4/XB1 Jaguars and only ~20GB/s bandwith to do it all in.
Ultimately it depends on the application - but for vast majority of CPU tasks - Jaguar is going to use only a fraction of that 20GB - even when higher-clocked.
More importantly (and this goes for GPU side especially) Sony has performance-profiles of all the software released on the platform, and actually have a statistically meaningful data point to talk about "balance" of bandwith utilization in their system, as opposed to arm-chair analysis based on wind-directions and so forth.
I guess it's also possible(perhaps even likely, based on some of the leaked contents) GPU architecture has changed (and thus necessary bandwith footprint).
Negotiator
Banned
Then care to explain why MS gave 30GB/s (50% more than the PS4 Jaguar) of memory bandwidth to the CPU?
Quick question.
Current PS4 cannot utilize SSD's full potential thanks to SATA2 and internal restriction (if there is one)
Any change PS4k can utilize SSD better? If that's the case I'm buying 1TB SSD along with 4k.
GPU seems like a nice upgrade.
Current PS4 cannot utilize SSD's full potential thanks to SATA2 and internal restriction (if there is one)
Any change PS4k can utilize SSD better? If that's the case I'm buying 1TB SSD along with 4k.
GPU seems like a nice upgrade.
jeff_rigby
Banned
To support the Xbox 360's PPC CPU for backward compatibility.
As to the memory bandwidth efficiencies for the custom Polaris GPU in NEO, they come with the better support for Context switching and GDDR5 (see my post above).
As I recall (it's been awhile since I looked at those spec) they have extra hardwired functionality geared towards data movement/processing, which are the type of operations that would require wider-bus at times.tapantaola said:
Not really much to do with CPU workloads as such though.
jeff_rigby
Banned
Possible but all that is Southbridge so that chip would need an upgrade. I think the Launch PS4 can support 4K media including UHD Blu-ray as that is all PS4 Southbridge + Custom Panasonic HDMI chip and a modern standard Blu-ray drive can be firmware updated to support version 2 disks used for UHD Blu-ray (33 GB/layer which in 2010 Sony said just required a firmware update).
DerZuhälter
Member
I'm late to the party, but what's up with that? I thought no titles are supposed to be only available to PS4K/Neo?
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
DerZuhälter;201441236 said:
They are not, they are just mentioning one that will probably showcase the "Neo Mode".