After much resistance, I am on board with the Neo

[potato_hamster]

Intrinsic said:

potato_hamster said:

If you bought a 1080p TV 3 years ago under the impression that when tv shows and movies were going to be converted to a 1080p format by teams that were pouring all of their effort into making that 1080p experience the best possible for the next 6-8 years, and then Sony  turned around and told all of the people making that content that they're going to have to make all content 4K compatible too, you'd probably be concerned that the 1080p content you recieve from that point onwards wouldn't be done to the same degree of quality it otherwise would be.

And of course, this would be justified, as you and I both know that budgets for the conversion team aren't going to increase, so now they team has  less time to do the same work they were doing before since they now have to do this other work on top of it. Aside from that, even assuming they will be given a bigger budget and more man power, the program you use for processing and playing this 1080p content now has to be modified to support 4K content as well, this means that this program uses more of your system's resources as it has to constantly check which video conversion program it had to run in the background. This means that fundamentally, even if the same care is taken to ensure the 1080p content looks as good as possible, the quality will go down as the system now can't process the 1080p video at the same rate it's used to.

So unlike you, I would understand if buying a television was the exact same thing as buying a game console. But it isn't, so stop making such terrible analogies.

Thats just complete nonsense tho.... and here's why. 

Remember how when the PS3 was released it by default ran PS2 games better and cleaner? Or how when you play 1080p content on some 4k TVs the TV automatically upscaled the content?

That's what's happenning here. The only requirement Sony is imposing on devs as far as the Neo goes, and it's clear as day in their leaked devs documentation, is that all games supporting a Neo mode must run at native 1080p and at a frame rate NO LESS THAN THE BASE PS4. They are not requiring devs to make games look nicer or have more features. They even forbid the latter. 

And here is the thing. What all that does to ensure platform parity and compatibility is that they are encouraging devs to still focus on the PS4 as the lead platform. Having done that, with the extra muscle in the PS4k getting there engine to do all the PS4 did but at native 1080p will be nothing more complicated that a (slightly complex) toggle for their engine to output in 1080p. And such a step is only needed in the cases of games that output at 900p on the PS4. But games that output at 1080p already are gonna be just fine as is. Albeit have a better framerate by default. which knowing devs will even be locked. 

This is not a Sony turning around to release a SKU and forcing devs to make an expericne that's better than what they originally started with and sold to 40M people. This is Sony making a SKU that supports 4k TVs and having devs take advantage of the provided extra muscle to provide an expericne that's not even possible on the base PS4. 

This is Sony having a 1080p console and a 4k console. Simple as that. 

The fact that the PS4k is considerably more powerful means that devs don't have to tinker to much with it to make it meet those locked 1080p requirements. which is probably set in stone cause Sony probably plans to upscale all 1080p native PS4 content to 4k that supports the Neo. upscaling from 1080p>4k is a 1:1 upscale. as opposed to upscaling arbitrary resolution types which will introduce upscaling artifacts. 

Again, one is a 1080p console. one is a 4k console. nothing more nothing less. You simply can't do 4k with the PS4 effectively as is. It doesn't even have a HDMI 2.0 port. 

Nice try tho. 

So please then, go ahead and tell me how this isn't any more work for developers. I mean you'd literally have to have first hand experience making console video games in order to really know that, so I'm all ears. Because in my experience making PS2, PS3, PS4, PSP and PSV games, this is actually a lot more work than more people realize. I know this because I have done the work in similar situations. I know this because I know what certifying a game is like with Sony, and what they expect in terms of QA. I know this because I know the consequences of a game failing certification in certain ways.

This will require developers to do more work to make a cerifiable build of a PS4 game. Sure it's not nearly as much work as maintaining both a PS4 and X1 build, but it's still more. Based on my experience, more work equals one thing - less time for everything else. Games will suffer as a result of this move, I guarantee it. There's literally nothing you can do to convince me otherwise because I actually know better. I have seen it first hand dozens of times. I have seen countless features cut from games because resources had to be shifted to work on frame rate issues for example. This is the same kind of thing except you know up front that you have less time to actually make features than you did before, so you probably just won't even bother starting on that soon-to-be-cut feature to begin with. Either way that's still one less feature that the game had a chance at having had the PS4 Neo not been introduced, and that's a game suffering as a result, and that's just a feature that no one will miss, but it could be a extra 4-5 FPS that is "cut" or 1080p resolution vs 900p that gets "cut" as a result of time spent developing the PS Neo build.  And I'm not even talking about practically doubling the amount of QA work that needs to be done, because both builds will need to be tested essentially as if they are seperate platforms.

The mere requirement to support the PS4 Neo makes all PS4 games with a hard budget and hard release date suffer. Period.