Intrinsic said:
Well said. Now to clear up some things. We really don't know anything about the PS4k. Or how or what exactly Sony intends for it. So there is that. Everything I said about Sony supporting this or that SKU for 10yrs or dropping this or that and changing the generational console upgrade model is all just an opinion. Based on nothing more than what I would call wishful thinking which I put up here on the forum to debate (as what forums are for to begin with) so that has no bearing on anythjng here. And you are right that I think it's that simple. You are also right that it's extra work, and it's possible that that work could have been better served fixing bugs and stuff. But that's taking an extreme situation and making it sound like the norm. Especially when we still have no idea exactly how Neo optimization will be implemented and what modifications will be needed on the engine side of things to accommodate it. I do like the example you made here. esepcially pointing out its effect for devs. And it only goes on to reenforce the point I've been trying to make. Today, 95% (made up number but probably true) of games have a PC version. And any game made on the PC have engines designed to cater to different output configurations of the game. As you said, in such cases accommodating a required 1080p version of the game for the PS4k will not be as much work as for an engine that doesn't have such parameters. I do understand that it's more work. But I firmly believe that it can't be that much more work to the point that entire development pipelines become more complicated and daunting esepcially if we take into account what kinda changes we are really talking about here. That part is really important. We are talking about 1080p being a requirement on a platform that already runs majority of its games at 1080p. Or for a SKU that has enough added muscle to basically brute force through the available code if increasing a preset from 900p to 1080p is required. We are talking of less than a 25% bump in resolution on a SKU that is providing about an 80% increase in processing power. (at least the part that deals with resolution). So I really don't think it's as big of a deal. Annoying to devs no doubt. But shouldn't in any way be game breaking or design breaking. I too don't know how resolutions are handled. As there are games designed natively at 900p but output at 1080p. I don't think it's that simple with the PS4k. "yh, you can build at 900p and our box will output at 4k" cause if it were Sony wouldn't have made it clearly one of their development requirements that all Neo games must be native 1080p. I feel that has something to do with whatever upscaling method Sony intends to implement. Anyways. we will see I guess. |
I suspect you're right there, that the 1080p requirement is for Sony's 4K upscaler. It's a lot easier to develop something that is doubling the number of pixels length and width wise than it is to develop something that say, has to multiply the length by 2.3 pixels and the width by 2.1. They likely have some sort of 4K upscaling chip in the post-processing that when it's enabled takes a 1080p video stream and upscales it to 4K before sending it to the TV. That would make sense.
But Sony has to make that 1080p milestone as easy as possible on developers. In an ideal world it would be completely hands off. In an ideal world developers would not have access to this extra power, Sony would be leveraging this extra power all on its own.
If Sony wants to do this console, they need to come out on E3 and essentially lay out the next 4 years of hardware on the PS4. As a PS4 owner I want to know how my console is going to be affected, if/when I can expect a PS5, if/when I can expect a PS4 Neo 2 etc. Sony needs to make their intentions very clear and they need to make it very clear how its going to affect core PS4 owners, PS4 new owners, and playstation owners beyond this console. They need to lay out all of their cards and ask Playstation owners to buy in. If in 2 years time, the PS4 Neo is going to be getting exclusive games, I want to know about it right now, not in 2 years time. If they say that is never going to happen it better never happen.
Sony is playing a very dangerous game and both as a developer and a PS4 owner I am very very leary. This can all go upside very very quickly if Sony doesn't play this very well. I'm not looking forward to E3 at all. I fully expect to be totally disappointed with Sony's plan.
