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PS4

New surrounding the PlayStation 4's upcoming update (codenamed Neo) continues to surface, and our understanding of what the new platform will offer is apace firming upwardly. While these unofficial leaks should exist treated equally rumors until formally confirmed by Sony itself, the fact that multiple publications are willing to speak firmly on-tape suggests that high-level sources are deliberately feeding information to the press (and yep, this is absolutely a matter that happens).

Eurogamer has a total breakup of the latest details, but here are some of the major highlights:

All games volition target 1080p as the minimum resolution: While in that location are no mainstream televisions that target 1440p as a native resolution, game developers will have the pick to return internally at college resolutions and downward-sample the game to 1080p output. Done properly, this provides a visual quality heave that'south quite similar to polish-screen antialiasing. Both Nvidia and AMD take provided technologies that tin perform this job in-driver on PCs; it'south one way to play older titles at 4K levels of fidelity fifty-fifty if you're stuck on an older monitor.

Game saves and online play are both cross-platform: All applications are supposed to be capable of saving games that can be played on either console, both consoles must be able to play together online, and the operating system will exist identical beyond both platforms. Backup information volition exist accessible on either console, though y'all tin can only have 1 primary panel and i PSN ID logged in at whatever given time.

No Neo-specific or PS4-specific titles: Older games can be patched for the Neo to offer forward compatibility, new titles must include such support from Day 1. All games will be available in unified binaries; the CPU binary is common to both platforms while the GPU binaries will come in up to three flavors: Neo-specific, PS4-specific, and a shared binary for both GPUs. This suggests that the CPU is a directly port of the before Jaguar APU, with a 500MHz clock speed crash-land.

Presumably developers are immune some leeway regarding higher resolution assets and textures for the Neo, and so long as these changes are not meaning and do not change the experience in ways that would disadvantage the PS4. Apart from the 1080p minimum mandatory resolution, Sony hasn't given many rendering guidelines. Games must be at least every bit fast on the Neo as on the PS4 and can offer enhanced versions of PS4 features merely not entirely new features. The example Eurogamer gives is that a game that supports 2-actor dissever-screen gaming on the PS4 can offer four-role player divide-screen on Neo. A PS4 game without split-screen at all, however, cannot offer split-screen as a Neo-only characteristic.

How much can Sony improve functioning?

Without knowing more about Polaris, we tin can't say for certain what the PlayStation 4'south upper performance boundary is, only we can have a crude estimate at what the minimum performance improvement looks like. While the comparison is not exact, the GPU inside the PlayStation 4 closely resembles a trimmed version of AMD'due south HD 7870 / R9 270. It so happens that AMD sold a Hawaii-class GPU with exactly 2x the R9 270's cadre count — the R9 290. Eyeballing the performance improvement from the R9 270 to the R9 290 should requite us a very rough idea of what to expect (Anandtech'due south Bench tool is extremely useful for this).

AnandTech-Bench

Data by Anandtech

If the minor bump from GCN ane.0 to 1.1 shown in a higher place was capable of nearly doubling frame rates, as shown above, the more significant bound from the PS4 to the Neo should offering larger gains. The one exception to this would be if the PS4's CPU or retentivity bandwidth prove to exist significant bottlenecks, and that's all the same possible. Even so, however, we come across a number of games running well to a higher place the lx FPS mark in 1080p.

The worst-instance improvement for the Neo over the base PS4 would be a xx-xxx% jump where a game is entirely CPU-bound or retentiveness bandwidth-jump. Best-instance improvement could be more than 2x. Hopefully Sony will permit developers to target 1080p/60 on at least some titles, fifty-fifty if the base PS4 game runs at 1080p/30.

The PS4 is expected to remain in-market alongside the Neo, possibly with a cost cut or an updated slim model. Microsoft is nevertheless remaining mum about its ain upgrade plans, only the company must accept a solution of its own coming through the pipeline.