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potato_hamster on 02 May 2018
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zorg1000 said:
potato_hamster said:


Yeah, the Switch exists. And? How are those PS4/X1 ports doing on it? Just a simple recompile after some slider adjustments? Couple weeks work maybe?

Nope. Not one bit. See porting to the Switch is actually more of the same. While developers using Unity will have an easier time (at a performance cost) PS4/X1 games generally are ported to Switch using the same concepts that PS3/X360 games were ported to Vita - adapting/replacing the engine until the it loads the game without crashing, reworking/downscaling all of the assets, simplfying models/rigging/animations, possibly downsampling the audio, rinse/repeat until you get something playable, then optimize/bug fix/add console-specific features until you go gold. This requires months of works and teams of professionals. This is not arbitrary. This is not easy. This costs real money.

Sony cannot have such a solution for a "portable PS4", can they? So, how does Switch prove anything again?

If you want to assume that there's some magic algorithms out there that are capable of doing this, be my guest, but at least be honest that it's little more than wishful thinking. And No, Microsoft's UWP doesn't actually apply to this at all . Please go and check it out, learn about how it truly works, and how that isn't going to help Sony make a portable PS4 at all. (I'll give you a hint: the minimum requirements of the PC games made under UWP aren't lower than the XBox One's specs for a reason).

Ya i cant see a "PS4 Portable" being any different than PSP/Vita.

PSP released 2 years before PS3 and was less powerful than PS2.

Vita released 2 years before PS4 and was less powerful than PS3.

PS4P would release ~2 years before PS5 and be less powerful than PS4.

 

Its not like you can just take the tech of PS4 and cram it into a $300 handheld device so a theoretical PS4P would be more like a PSP3.


Well, yes and no. It depends on what you want. Do you want a PSP3 or a Portable PS4. If you're talking about a truly portable PS4 it could not be "less powerful".  If it's supposed to run digital PS4 games out of the box, its likely going to need to run at the same frame rate, at the same resolution, with the same levels of detail that the PS4 offers, of course its going to have to be able to perform as well as a PS4. But that doesn't mean it can't leverage newer technologies in order to achieve the same performance on lower cost, more capable, more efficient hardware.

The big question is - does that hardware exist? Can Sony make a portable console for say under a $400 price point in the next 6-12 months that is capable of taking any digital PS4 game and playing it as if it was a PS4? It's not whether a portable device can achieve PS4 levels of performance, it's whether a portable device can achieve PS4 levels of performance while convincing a PS4 game's engine it is the same as any other PS4. That is the only way (that I know of) that you can make "porting" games to the PS4 portable with little to no work. This is how the PS4 Pro is able to play PS4 games from 2013 that have never been patched. It tells the game it's a regular PS4 and mimics it perfectly. A PS4 portable would have to do the same as far as I'm aware.

 But let's go with it. What technology exists today is capable of emulating a PS4 CPU and GPU perfectly that has a low enough TDP and power consumption properties that it can be used in a handheld for a reasonable price point? Can for example a combination of say a modern ARM processor and an Tegra X2 be used to emulate the performance of the PS4's x86 and AMD-based APU even though it would use a completely different APIs? If it can, please point to me where an APU or combination chips of portable under say, $300 retail are being used to do something even remotely similar. If there isn't any such demonstrations out there, if we don't actually know of a way to leverage these new technologies to effectively emulate the PS4, then the PS4 is not happening. If there's no way for this PS4 portable to emulate a PS4 almost perfectly, then developers are going to have to port games to this PS4 Portable the same way they have to port games to the Switch, which means you no longer have a PS4 Portable, you have a PSP3, and I don't think Sony has any interest in releasing that.

Maybe it can run at a lower resolution and at lower graphical fidelity, but that's going to require developers to go in and support this lower operating mode in their game engines, and that's not nearly as arbitrary as many are claiming it to be.