scrapking said:
In addition to what you mentioned, the Xbox One S's optical drive was also upgraded to handle triple-layer UHD BDs. I'm not sure if the PS4 is capable of dealing with those out of the box or not. I did a quick web search but got some conflicting information about its BD-XL support. Planar die shrink vs. finFET? I read that in the Digital Foundry article, and now here as well. I'm not 100% sure what the significant of planar vs. FinFET is, honestly. Time for another web search I guess, thank you for your comments. I found them interesting and educational. :) EDIT TO ADD: How much of the GPU clock increase was simply because moving to a smaller process addressed heat issues to the point that they could increase it without penalty? Was the entire increase needed for HDR, or did they go a little further than that just because they could? |
The drive in the ps4 is fast enough in theory to read UHD discs however it does not have hardware level AACS 2.0, drive level DRM needed to access UHD discs. Dunno whether it can see the 3rd layer either. People have tried UHD discs in standard BDXL drives to no effect. Without AACS 2.0 it simply can't access the disc.
Maybe they could go further with the clock, yet it also has a smaller fan and power brick inside (saves a lot of costs yet adds heat) I doubt MS wants to risk more overheating issues. It's hard to predict what extra juice you need for 10 bit output. The final output buffer is 25% larger memory wise yet plenty 3D games render in fp16 anyway, it's really only the final step that needs extra work. The increase in memory speed was likely more important than the extra GPU power, more data to shift around in the final stage.
