potato_hamster said:
No. My post is why Sony isn't stupid enough to do what many people are assuming they will be. What is the reason behind the PS4K that has enhanced hardware specs for games? There is none. That's my point.
- If no one is expecting the PS4k to have exclusives than the extra processing power will not be supported by third parties. There is literally no incentive for them to do so. See the N64 expansion pak, the PSP spec improvements, and the new 3DS. In all of those cases the vast majority of games that were released after that point did not take advantage of the hardware in any way. And you probably shouldn't act as if the new 3DS was successful, since the vast majority (over 95% of games since release ) don't take advantage of the added performance, and outside of the release window, has done absolutely nothing to inccrease 3DS sales. In fact regular 3DS outsell the new 3DS 2 or 3 to 1 to this day. In fact they sold more 3DSs at $200, then they sold new 3DSs at $200 over the same time frame. It appears people just don't see the added value, and it's not hard to see why. There is literally no incentive for third parties to support consoles like this. The Divison isn't selling any more copies if it's running at 60 fps as opposed to 30 fps. Sure some might buy it on PS4 instead of X1, but that's all the same money to the developer. That's an awful lot of effort to put in for literally zero reward. It is 100% wishful thinking to hope third parties would throw money away investing in developing games for these added specs for no reward.
- Doing a die shrink inviolves optimizing the process for that partucilar APU. Developiong a new more powerful APU would require doing almost all of the work of that die shrink all over again. It's not that simple. It can take months of development to get acceptable yields. That's why when they develop a process of shrinking dies they don't just automatically start making all chips at that size. Also, you need to consider that a 4K APU would undoubtedly be more complex, use more power, and likely produce far more heat, and therefore, they may have to increase the die size, not decrease it, in order to produce it at acceptable yields.
- Yes when the PS3 came out, most people didn't have a 1080p TV, but most did have 720p HDTVs that would be a noticable improvement over the 480p output of the PS2. That's probably why most of the games at the time were optimized for 720p, and that's probably why 1080p only really became the objective with the PS4 and X1 and even then they're not really hitting the mark. Now you want to improve the specs and get them to render at 4 times the resolution they're struggling with now. Okay. How much do you want this PS4K to cost? Because if its going to play games at native 4K is going to cost a lot more than $400. The APU alone should cost at least that.
Besides, how would they be missing the 4K market at all if they make a PS4 slim with a 4K ready blu-ray player and HDMI port capable of playing 4K blu-rays, and maybe upscaling game video output to 4K, or maybe make some VR output a little smoother? Ohh right. They wouldn't. This is what Sony is probably making, in a slim for factor, with a higher profit margin, because that is what makes good business sense.
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So a new PS4 with an upgraded GPU and more horse power to be utilised in games? Cool, pretty whats being discussed here so I don't understand your saltiness? Its also whats reported in the Kotaku report, the whole basis of this thread "Besides resolution, developers would have an opportunity to push more effects and other graphical tweaks to make their games look better, thanks to the new GPU."
HD TV's only managed 50% market penetration in 2009, so most people did not own a 720p in 2005. . More 4k Tvs were sold in the US in 2015 then HD Tvs were sold in 2005 and thats even a surprise to me, but thats what little bit of research gives you.
PS4k obviously isn't rendering games (AAA) natively at 4k, that hasn't been the discussion at any point.
You're really just reinforcing my point with your first paragraph. 3 systems over 3 different generations each incoporating a power upgrade of some kind. The same argument you're proposing would have applied to all of them includng Nintendo in 2014 but yet the N3DS was real. As for the systems success, it doesn't need to outsell the old 3DS to be considered a success, it needs to bring in additional revenue that they otherwise wouldn't have seen, sales that wouldn't have occured from a cheaper model. The N3DS done its job of slowing down Nintendo's hardware decline, the system missed its forcast by 1m so I'm not sure it fell too short from expectation performance wise.
As I said the extent to which the PS4k recieves support from 3rd Paries isn't that relevant to the discussion and is an unknown even if you think its a certainty. Sony are not unstoppable genius' and they've made tons of bad mistakes in the past, they managed to hand half the market to Microsoft when trasitioning to PS3, lost all of the money they made with PS2, produced a failure in the form of the Vita and the PS Move was more or less dead on arrival. If only you were there to assert that sony "isn't stupid enough" to make bad decisions.
But I'll leave it there and wait to see what the future reveals :)
