PS4.5/PS4K Is Codenamed 'NEO' And More Info

[Pemalite]

potato_hamster said:

Pemalite said:

 

 

 

The game engines already support the hardware.
It is literally a matter of tweaking sliders as API's, drivers, OS everything else will remain the same.

If anything Multiplatforms will be closer to the PC now in regards to graphics as most PS4 games were only high-graphics compared to the PC's Ultra.

The game engine is optimized for a specific hardware configuration. it is optimized for bottlenecks specific to that hardware configuration. You just can't take the existing hardware engine and say "we'll just tweak this number and that number and this other number" and boom an engine just as optimized for PS4K and it was for PS4. As you've mentioned, different hardware configurations introduce different bottlenecks. These have to be accounted for, and solutions need to be developed. While you're right that it's less work than say optimizing an engine for the Nintendo NX, it's still a significant amount of work. People are going to spend months developing it, and engine revisions and improvements will take longer going forward. And again, there's literally doubling the amount of QA work needed. There's no two ways around that. The PS4K build will have to be tested as equally as the PS4 build is now. That's a fact.

This will make games more expensive to develop for PS4 going forward. Period. That means if developers have the option, they won''t support it, and if they don't they'll cut corners in other ways to keep the development costs the same. Budgets only increase if expected sales increase, and this specification bump gives no reason for developers to expect additional sales.

Or. Games will just be developed with the PS4 4K and PC in mind (Ultra graphics) and continue the practice of downgrading the games for the regular PS4. (High equivalent graphics.)

Nate4Drake said:

Nope ! Sony and AMD have a much higher understanding than anybody here about hardware, and 218GB/s memory bandwidth is more than enough considering The new Polaris Architecture is a lot more efficient, and "less memory bandwidth hungry"; also, don't forget about PS4 being heavily geared towards asynchronous compute which will allow non-graphics calulations to be done on the GPU !!! Plus, some CUs can be used enterely for non-graphics calulations, working together with the CPU, increasing massively the overal "non-graphics calulations" capability !!!  Don't say things you have no idea, please. Let the experts work on it. PS4 NEO will be as balanced as PS4, just MORE powerful.

1) We have no idea if the PS4 4K will use Polaris.

2) If you think 218GB/s is enough bandwidth for 4k AAA games, then... You are highly mistaken, I am going to assume you have never used high-end hardware and thus never gamed at resolutions that exceed 1080P... So allow me to educate you on this... Higher resolutions need allot of bandwidth.

3) Some non-graphics calculations are suited to being executed upon the GPU, some are not. - Because some calculations are very single-thread heavy, which a GPU is not adept at due to their highly parallel nature. There is a reason why CPU's and GPU's are still seperated functionally, because a CPU is adept as some tasks, the GPU is adept at others, both can do a "little" bit of each others work.

HoloDust said:

Pemalite said:

The PS4's GPU is close to a Radeon 7850.
This would put it near the Radeon 7970... At-least in terms of CU's.
We have no idea if it's using GCN 1.3 with it's colour compression or not, how many Texture Mapping Units or Render Output Pipelines or even if they bolstered the geometry units.
Way to many unknowns.

28nm is perfectly feasible, they will likely be aggressive with the voltages.
As a fabrication process matures you can tweak things for lower power consumption and more performance.

Performance wise, sure, numbers on the sheet are pretty similar to 7850. But it's 1280:80:32 chip with 2CUs disabled...I just don't know (nor was I ever able to find any info) is it Pitcairn XT with ACEs from Hawaii or is it Hawaii Pro cut in half (with 2 CUs disabled).

36CUs amount to 2304 shaders, which honestly sounds a lot like 40CUs (2560 shaders) of 290/390 cut down by 4CUs for better yields...so maybe 2304:144:64...which seems a lot to put onto 28nm if they want to keep TDP low.

I guess 28nm might be feasible if they're ditching PS4's design and going more toward the original PS3 TDP route...which I wouldn't be surprised honestly, if anything I was surprised by low TDP design of PS4 to begin with.

Would be pretty funny if AMD changed the amount of ALU's in a SIMD and the amount of SIMD's in a CU for the PS4 4k.

Need more info on the chip though.
Even with 2304:144:64 core layout, it would still only be a Radeon 7970 in terms of performance due to clocks, Which in my opinion, is what the PS4 should have released with.

Pretty sure the PS4's GPU is just an enhanced Pitcairn, GCN 1 chip.

The PS4 4k might not even use Hawaii, it *could* use a pair of Pitcairn dies.
AMD's GCN layout is also fairly modular, so it's fairly easy to scale it up and down as needed.