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potato_hamster on 19 April 2016
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mutantsushi said:
potato_hamster said:


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.  ... The PS4K build will have to be tested as equally as the PS4 build is now. That's a fact.

But x-gen PS4.0/4.5 games DON'T have to be "just as optimized" for PS4.5, they can take advantage of the X% more CPU and memory bandwidth and Y% more GPU power to add/boost performance.  PS4.5 will have a significant amount of free capacity beyond PS4, and you CAN just turn up sliders for res, FPS, lighting to fill that.  You don't have test equally because the architecture IS largely just scaled up.  YES, to "fully optimize" for PS4k would be more work, but you don't have to "fully optimize" in order to get a product that has noticeable benefit from running on PS4.5.  

If CPU/Memory BW has been boosted by 25% while GPU doubled, it's safe to assume 25% headroom for scaling without running into different bottleneck.
To FULLY leverage the new (half) gen platform, will take more work, but there is plenty of scope for "easy" gains with little dev/testing... IMHO.

You actually do have to test equally. What on earth are you talking about? You have to be able to demonstrate to Sony that you have throughly tested your game, and even then they don't believe you and test it for you. You cannot assume your game will "just work" on the PS4K. You have to demonstrate that it does, that your enhancements, that the memory allocations you made still result in a game that doesn't hard or softlock. Because if Sony finds one of those while certifying, kiss your application money goodbye and start again. That is how it works. Want to go lazy on testing and have to go through certification three times (been there!) then that's tens of thousands of dollars you just lit up in flames. The same goes for other hardware manufacturers. Even though I've never worked on a New 3DS games, I do have colleagues that have and they literally doubled their alloted QA time and budget to support the new specification, because Nintendo has similar demands if you want to get a game on their system.

Ans I'm not sure why you think BOLDING AND CAPITALIZING YOUR TEXT MAKES YOU MORE RIGHT but you're still wrong about the whole "slider" bit. If the PS4K eliminates bottlenecks the PS4 has, and your engine has been designed around creating specific timing or ordering or instructions to minimize the impact of that bottleneck then you have to create an entirely new solution for the PS4K. And while it's fine and dandy to say "well it's just larger allocations of resources to handle" it's entirely possible that those larger resources are now fetching data from caches at a rate that's faster than your engine was designed to handle, meaning you now have to account for a potential backlog of instructions which could lead to further bottlenecks. My point is -  you still have to optimize for the new hardware! You always do with consoles. It's not just a matter of increasing memory allocations and telling the engine the CPU clock speed is 1.5x larger and mailing it in.