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Forums - Sony - PS4.5/PS4K Is Codenamed 'NEO' And More Info

Intrinsic on 19 April 2016
Turkish said:
4TFlop GPU but only a 500Mhz upclock to the CPU? That doesn't sound right. That's not gonna give 60fps to some 30fps some games.

What this does is make those dipping 30fps games a solid 30fps and the 60fps games a solid 60fps.

i don't think this is intended to make 30fps games become 60fps games. 

This just means that we get the game running in whatever way it is on the PS4 but with a locked framerate, better effects (AF,AA,DoF,LOD, lighting....etc. It may also support some sort of hardware upscaling to 4k but the games themselves will natively be rendered at 1080p.

I also feel that devs will continue focusing on the stock PS4 version of the games. You get the game running at its best there then anything you do for the PS4n is just a matter of moving some parameters up..... 



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Train wreck on 19 April 2016
TH-Work said:
Everyone who owns a PlayStation 4 instead of PS4K will be a second class gamer for Sony and your Friends ;)

Thats fine, Sony's first and second class gamers will be better off than the current (and their future) competetion.  Its a win-win for Sony



HoloDust on 19 April 2016
Pemalite said:
HoloDust said:
Hm, I'm wondering what that GPU is, if that rumour is true...

PS4's GPU is either downclocked 7870 (Pitcairn) with 2CUs disabled, plus some additional circuitry from Hawaii, or it's downclocked 290 (Hawaii Pro) cut in half with 2CUs disabled.

So, this would be something like downclocked 290/390 with 4CUs disabled...or maybe it's Polaris based, which I doubt, but in any case I guess it needs to be on 14nm, 28nm would be too power hungry.

The PS4's GPU is close to a Radeon 7850.
This would put it near the Radeon 7970... At-least in terms of CU's.
We have no idea if it's using GCN 1.3 with it's colour compression or not, how many Texture Mapping Units or Render Output Pipelines or even if they bolstered the geometry units.
Way to many unknowns.

28nm is perfectly feasible, they will likely be aggressive with the voltages.
As a fabrication process matures you can tweak things for lower power consumption and more performance.

Performance wise, sure, numbers on the sheet are pretty similar to 7850. But it's 1280:80:32 chip with 2CUs disabled...I just don't know (nor was I ever able to find any info) is it Pitcairn XT with ACEs from Hawaii or is it Hawaii Pro cut in half (with 2 CUs disabled).

36CUs amount to 2304 shaders, which honestly sounds a lot like 40CUs (2560 shaders) of 290/390 cut down by 4CUs for better yields...so maybe 2304:144:64...which seems a lot to put onto 28nm if they want to keep TDP low.

I guess 28nm might be feasible if they're ditching PS4's design and going more toward the original PS3 TDP route...which I wouldn't be surprised honestly, if anything I was surprised by low TDP design of PS4 to begin with.



potato_hamster on 19 April 2016
Pemalite said:

 

 

 

potato_hamster said:

Console video game development is not a matter of tweaking sliders. Engines are not designed to support this new specification. It's actually a whole pile of extra work, and literally double the QA cost when there is literally zero expectation for increased sales. None.

Video game developers get nothing out of supporting a higher-spec console except lower profits.

The game engines already support the hardware.
It is literally a matter of tweaking sliders as API's, drivers, OS everything else will remain the same.

If anything Multiplatforms will be closer to the PC now in regards to graphics as most PS4 games were only high-graphics compared to the PC's Ultra.


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. As you've mentioned, different hardware configurations introduce different bottlenecks. These have to be accounted for, and solutions need to be developed. While you're right that it's less work than say optimizing an engine for the Nintendo NX, it's still a significant amount of work. People are going to spend months developing it, and engine revisions and improvements will take longer going forward. And again, there's literally doubling the amount of QA work needed. There's no two ways around that. The PS4K build will have to be tested as equally as the PS4 build is now. That's a fact.

This will make games more expensive to develop for PS4 going forward. Period. That means if developers have the option, they won''t support it, and if they don't they'll cut corners in other ways to keep the development costs the same. Budgets only increase if expected sales increase, and this specification bump gives no reason for developers to expect additional sales.



Train wreck on 19 April 2016

I guess its threads like these that kinda highlight how stupid the Internet can be. Outside of a few in the vocal minority, no one will care and Sony will continue to sell systems at a near record pace. When I buy my new car this year, I'm not going to be upset that i got the base model vs the LX Turbo, I will get the car that fits my needs for the price I'm willing to pay...I don't see how this is any different.



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teigaga on 19 April 2016

Everyone is shook but the future is inevitable ^_^



Nate4Drake on 19 April 2016
Pemalite said:
HoloDust said:

I don't know, even if it's not 36CUs, but rather something like 380X/M395X, unless they are designing PS4K to be more like PS3, I'm not sure they could cram so much CUs into such a small space and TDP on 28nm...but I guess we'll just have to wait a bit longer, they don't hide their specs.

There is tons of free capacity on 28nm at the moment as most semiconductor companies (Intel, Samsung, Qualcom, nVidia and more!) have shifted to lower feature sizes, so building large 28nm chips with lower yields has become a little more feasible as a fab not producing chips is a fab not bringing in revenue, especially as many won't be retooled to something smaller for a year or two yet.
And with 28nm being as old as it is... It's extremely mature.

I would assume some of the chips that don't meet the voltage and clock specs might end up as die-harvested parts and end up in the regular PS4.

sc94597 said:

Sorry guys, having a boosted (clock-wise) CPU and GPU is not enough to warrant calling the thing a "separate platform to develop for." All of the architectural quirks remain the same.

Not exactly. It just took on some new qwerks.
For instance... Whilst the CU's have doubled, everything else hasn't... Suddenly the system just gained a bunch of new bottlenecks that are different or more pronounced from the original machine.

sc94597 said:

This is faulty logic. Firstly, the Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators are not fully developed nor near-fully accurate.

We have no idea what new hardware specifications (if any) it takes to do that. Secondly, the CPU bottleneck on PC doesn't exist as it does with consoles. If we used CPU's as weak as the Jaguar line to emulate 360 and PS3 games we might notice performance variations between the two emulators, in fact I would be very surprised if they didn't exist considering the uniqueness of the cell vs. the pretty standard PPC in the 360. When you have highly clocked i5's and i7's running these games the bottlenecks dissapear as they can brute force their way through emulation of the key features of the cell. I would also like to note that until the emulator developers decided to use DX12, the PS3 emulator was lagging behind the 360 emulator in performance. Now it is ahead of the curve. Sony doesn't have an API (out of lack of necessity) that is meant for translating between architectures in a general level like this. 

Those are just few reasons why we can't use this logic. There probably are more reasons that I haven't thought of. Having said that, I wouldn't say that PS3 emulation on PS4 is impossible, just a lot more work for what might not be so great results. I don't see Sony taking the risk unless they are sure they'll be able to make a good emulator. 

1) You don't need it to be fully accurate. "Good enough" suffices.
2) You are assuming that Emulating a console game on a PC is exactly the same as how a console would emulate a console game, ignoring the fact that Microsoft/Sony has intimite knowledge of the OS, Drivers, API's, Hardware and other nuances that emulator devs don't have access too, they have to guess and reverse engineer everything.
3) Sony does have an API. It's called Vulkan. - The Xbox One and Playstation 4 also have low level API's that are Faster than Direct X 12 and Vulkan, but are more difficult to program for.
4) Xbox One is proof in the pudding.

CosmicSex said:

Guys, hold up one second:

GPU AMD GCN, 18 CUs at 800 MHz Improved AMD GCN, 36 CUs at 911 MHz

This can't be right.  This unit would be extrodinarly more powerful than the PS4

If my calculations are correct, this rumor calls for a system outputing 4.2Tflops compared to 1.84 in the PS4

I really have doubts about this.

Can someone tell me if the what the actual a system memory bandwidth of 218Gb/s would even be enough to feed this GPU?

Unfortunately the rest of the system hasn't caught up, so you will likely have a bandwidth and CPU bottleneck.
The GPU is also 4.19 Teraflops. ;P

As for Bandwidth... It's not enough for 4k. It might not even be enough for Quad-High Definition, but it is more than enough for 1080P.

HoloDust said:
Hm, I'm wondering what that GPU is, if that rumour is true...

PS4's GPU is either downclocked 7870 (Pitcairn) with 2CUs disabled, plus some additional circuitry from Hawaii, or it's downclocked 290 (Hawaii Pro) cut in half with 2CUs disabled.

So, this would be something like downclocked 290/390 with 4CUs disabled...or maybe it's Polaris based, which I doubt, but in any case I guess it needs to be on 14nm, 28nm would be too power hungry.

The PS4's GPU is close to a Radeon 7850.
This would put it near the Radeon 7970... At-least in terms of CU's.
We have no idea if it's using GCN 1.3 with it's colour compression or not, how many Texture Mapping Units or Render Output Pipelines or even if they bolstered the geometry units.
Way to many unknowns.

28nm is perfectly feasible, they will likely be aggressive with the voltages.
As a fabrication process matures you can tweak things for lower power consumption and more performance.

Turkish said:
4TFlop GPU but only a 500Mhz upclock to the CPU? That doesn't sound right. That's not gonna give 60fps to some 30fps some games.

What this does is make those dipping 30fps games a solid 30fps and the 60fps games a solid 60fps.

It's not meant to "Upgrade" the current games, that would require patching to the current software.

If a game is compute bound on the GPU, then it will be linear increase in performance, if it is CPU or bandwidth bound, then the difference isn't going to be as nearly as pronounced.

potato_hamster said:

Console video game development is not a matter of tweaking sliders. Engines are not designed to support this new specification. It's actually a whole pile of extra work, and literally double the QA cost when there is literally zero expectation for increased sales. None.

Video game developers get nothing out of supporting a higher-spec console except lower profits.

The game engines already support the hardware.
It is literally a matter of tweaking sliders as API's, drivers, OS everything else will remain the same.

If anything Multiplatforms will be closer to the PC now in regards to graphics as most PS4 games were only high-graphics compared to the PC's Ultra.

JEMC said:

The main problem with it being 14nm is that AMD only produces the Jaguar cores in the 28nm process, and I doubt they're willing to bring Jaguar to 14nm having Puma around. And they can't use both processes together with one APU.

That said, the fastest Jaguar processor was the 2.05GHz Athlon 5350. Has AMD made a faster version of the CPU? Is the leak incorrect and Neo uses Puma cores? And if the leak is incorrect in that part, what else can be wrong/false?

Puma is just an evolutionary upgrade over Jaguar it's not a stark difference, it's the same Micro-architecture, pretty sure they all have the same extensions and instructions.

Jaguar could also run at faster than 2ghz, but because the transisters used are targeting a frequency lower than that... Expect power consumption to get out of control if you go beyond that.

walsufnir said:
Guy with the mononoke avatar, post if you're ok ☺
Well, the classic console cycle is over. MS will follow news wise (they are most probably already developing a new iteration), Sony is officially doing it and nobody knows what Nintendo is going to do.

Only if it's a success will Microsft follow. :P

Next gen is probably 3~ years away now.

Nope ! Sony and AMD have a much higher understanding than anybody here about hardware, and 218GB/s memory bandwidth is more than enough considering The new Polaris Architecture is a lot more efficient, and "less memory bandwidth hungry"; also, don't forget about PS4 being heavily geared towards asynchronous compute which will allow non-graphics calulations to be done on the GPU !!! Plus, some CUs can be used enterely for non-graphics calulations, working together with the CPU, increasing massively the overal "non-graphics calulations" capability !!!  Don't say things you have no idea, please. Let the experts work on it. PS4 NEO will be as balanced as PS4, just MORE powerful.



”Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”

Harriet Tubman.

ZahaDoom on 19 April 2016
Train wreck said:
I guess its threads like these that kinda highlight how stupid the Internet can be. Outside of a few in the vocal minority, no one will care and Sony will continue to sell systems at a near record pace. When I buy my new car this year, I'm not going to be upset that i got the base model vs the LX Turbo, I will get the car that fits my needs for the price I'm willing to pay...I don't see how this is any different.

   Tell that to the Microsoft engineers when they were designing the Xbox one and wasting resources on Kinect and an HDMi in port. Oh "only that minority is going to care we underperform as a gaming machine", everyone on the Internet is stupid anyways.

 That worked out well for them didn't it.

And your car analogy is way off, it's more like you bought the base model last month, and this month they release the LX Turbo at the SAME price. If you had known, you could held off a month. Or still got the base but cheaper.



SonytendoAmiibo on 19 April 2016
Sony isn't officially doing anything. Nintendo isn't even officially releasing a console in the next two years. I don't get it. You're given a tiny crumb of an unsubstantiated rumor and you turn it into an official announcement.


We just went through this crap with the fake NX controllers. Is anyone actually learning anything?

I mean really, I should start a rumor that Microsoft and Nintendo are combining forces and the NX is actually a collaboration between the two so people like you would start posting in threads about MS exiting the console space. That'd be a good laugh.

Damn! I just made my SONYTENDOamiibo avatar too. Well, I better start working on my MICROTENDOamiibo avatar then. Let's see, Master Chief's head on which amiibo..........



   

Hey! They got SONY on my amiibo! Wait a minute. Two great gaming tastes that game great together!

Switch FC: SW-0398-8858-1969

yvanjean on 19 April 2016
think-man said:
ZahaDoom said:

 I'm not game for a two tiered console generation. This is going to leave a bad bad taste in a good 70% of the 40million customers they already suckered into getting the beta ps4.

I haven't owned a Nintendo console since GameCube, well i have a DS, but Nintendo doesn't consider my demographic a customer, they bailed on my I bailed on them.

Same with Microsoft.

 Guess I'll build a new PC and get  Vive for VR.

It doesn't change a thing, this will probably actually provide Sony with a chance to match the nx in power. I don't see an issue with it, games will still run beautifully on the ps4, and thr original ps4 will probably get a price drop giving more people a chance to buy one.

How can you even make that statement? THe FPS is going to be better on PS4k and games developers will make their game for the PS4k and downscale the game to work on the PS4. Expect, broken frame rate and more glitch for PS4 games in the future.