PS4 Pro Official Specifications (Codename NEO)

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So on that topic if we could expand that a bit, the HDR firmware update for existing PS4, I was under the assumption HDMI 2.0 was the requirement, and I'm pretty sure PS4 does not have one of those so, are they basically sending 1080p HDR signal to get around bandwidth constraints? Or like, can we discuss the technical there ?


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AMD 300 series gpu gained HDR support up to 4K at 30 fps through hdmi 1.4. HDMI 2.0a is only needed for 4K at frame rates above 30. But even Dolby version which is a 12 bit based solution supports hdmi 1.4.
 
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they said there were features beyond Polaris . Could it be something from vega ?

One glib answer is that Neo presumably will still have a Trueaudio-like hardware block, which Polaris does not.
Possibly, it also inherits some of the compute and coherent memory tweaks of Orbis that Polaris as a discrete would not have.

I hope there is more detail about how backwards compatibility is handled, since there are points of conflict between Polaris and Sea Islands that don't show a trivial path to handling.
One oddity with Neo mode and standard mode relative to Polaris is what happens with the ROP count. The standard relationship between shader engines and back ends either changes to let Neo mode and its extra engines to be toggled off for compatibility reasons without deactivating ROPs, or Neo winds up having broader rasterization or pixel output.
Either way, it seems like there is going to be a difference, and preferably a difference in a positive direction.

The emphasis on hardware acceleration for what looks to be a standardized path for checkerboard rendering might include pipeline tweaks to better cull and filter with a known stride and alternating frame pattern. The extra front end and back end resources might be tweaked to provide resources or computation for the shortcuts (accelerated stairstep smoothing with spare resources?), maybe compression can be tweaked with the known pattern of writes and reads.
GCN has some amount of tiling already for its rendering, and I wonder if Vega will be going further in that regard. Some shortcuts from that might apply back when Sony is targeting an upscaling scheme instead of having to flesh out a more generalist implementation.

I'm curious to what extent Neo is like Polaris or Orbis, and how much that goes into Neo is attention and engineering that goes no further than Sony's platform. Good for Sony, but not lifting the GCN boat in arenas where console lowered expectations apply.
 
Is it possible the ps4 is sporting an 8 ACE version of Polaris. The 480 seems to be limited to 4 but would it be wise to cut ps4 original config in half for Neo?
 
I'm not really sure I even understand the purpose of branding the Ps4 pro as a 4k machine. Sure games will benefit from the built in checker board upscaling hardware, but why the necessity for 2x plus the compute units just to upscale most games from 1080p? I'm sure some games will run at 1440p and some even at true 4k, but why not use the 2x GPU boost to improve frame rates and details? Then use the upscale hardware to go 4k. I know the CPU and ram may be an issue with some titles. I just don't see the point in pushing so hard for 4k gaming when they could of used VR as some sort of selling point for the upgrade.
 
Is it possible the ps4 is sporting an 8 ACE version of Polaris. The 480 seems to be limited to 4 but would it be wise to cut ps4 original config in half for Neo?
Polaris 10 has 4 ACEs + 2 HWS (like Tonga & Fiji). Each HWS can be configured to act as 2 ACE's, so it has 8 ACEs in total in such a mode.
 
Something I didnt quite get with this PS4 Pro. Will it run all games at 4k? Or is it just upscale to 4k? If I remember correctly last Eurogamer's article about what they estimated PS4 Neo to do, they werent expecting it to be powerful enough to run all games at 4K.
Or was I wrong?
Also, in case of 1080p only TVs, are we certain the console will give us the option to play games at higher framerates?
 
I'm not really sure I even understand the purpose of branding the Ps4 pro as a 4k machine. Sure games will benefit from the built in checker board upscaling hardware, but why the necessity for 2x plus the compute units just to upscale most games from 1080p? I'm sure some games will run at 1440p and some even at true 4k, but why not use the 2x GPU boost to improve frame rates and details? Then use the upscale hardware to go 4k. I know the CPU and ram may be an issue with some titles. I just don't see the point in pushing so hard for 4k gaming when they could of used VR as some sort of selling point for the upgrade.
It's not from 1080p, checkerboard rendering needs half the pixels so they need to render 1080p *2 to reconstruct a 4K image. So the 2.3 faster GPU would be ideal indeed to render 2x 1080p pixels particularly if the upscaling is free.

lnYHDdx.png
 
It's not from 1080p, checkerboard rendering needs half the pixels so they need to render 1080p *2 to reconstruct a 4K image. So the 2.3 faster GPU would be ideal indeed to render 2x 1080p pixels particularly if the upscaling is free.

lnYHDdx.png
How much power the resolution race is eating from our precious flops increments...
 
I'm not really sure I even understand the purpose of branding the Ps4 pro as a 4k machine. Sure games will benefit from the built in checker board upscaling hardware, but why the necessity for 2x plus the compute units just to upscale most games from 1080p? I'm sure some games will run at 1440p and some even at true 4k, but why not use the 2x GPU boost to improve frame rates and details? Then use the upscale hardware to go 4k. I know the CPU and ram may be an issue with some titles. I just don't see the point in pushing so hard for 4k gaming when they could of used VR as some sort of selling point for the upgrade.

It's up to the developers to decide on how to use the extra performance. For CPU-bound games going from 30fps on PS4 to 60fps on PS4Pro might be difficult, but they could for example - on PS4Pro - render at 1440p (which is 1,8x PS4 GPU), use the remaining 0,5x for better shaders and upscale the result to 4k. This way you'd have much better IQ and much better graphics at the same time.
 
With Polaris architecture's texture compression features - which should save bandwidth - do you think we can finally see games using 8-16x AF?
 
Something I didnt quite get with this PS4 Pro. Will it run all games at 4k? Or is it just upscale to 4k? If I remember correctly last Eurogamer's article about what they estimated PS4 Neo to do, they werent expecting it to be powerful enough to run all games at 4K.
Or was I wrong?
Also, in case of 1080p only TVs, are we certain the console will give us the option to play games at higher framerates?

As I understand it - if connected to 4k TV - PS4Pro will output the picture in full 4k, but whether or not that picture is rendered natively at 4k or some smaller res (e.g. 1440p, 1600p, 1800p?) depends on the game. I guess something like Inside or Tearaway could be native 4k, most games will be somewhere between 1080p and native 4k which with clever hardware-assisted upscaling will provide much better IQ than 1080p, but worse than native 4k.
 
The real reason Sony didn't include a 4K BR drive is... Courage.

I'd agree provided they'd be an important provider of streamed 4k content. However, I noticed they only mentioned Netflix & YouTube, while completely avoided referencing Playstation Vue. Also, I don't think they're in Apple's position in terms of being market leader and trend-setter... :)
 
Does anyone know if the Pro can stream at a resolution higher than 720p?
 
Valve's "checkerboard" rendering for VR with reconstruction does look like something that maybe could be implemented in a hardware upscaler. I didn't notice that Digital Foundry had linked to it in their article.

Page 23, of this PDF http://alex.vlachos.com/graphics/Alex_Vlachos_Advanced_VR_Rendering_Performance_GDC2016.pdf

Doesn't seem to use any temporal information. It's purely constructed from neighboring pixels. If the quality is good, then it's definitely a great idea.
 
It will stream 1080p 60fps to Twitch and Youtube. But the max you can record the the HDD is 30fps.
Thanks! Then it will probably stream 1080p60 to the PC and Xperia handhelds too.

For the people streaming to larger screens this is a huge upgrade!
 
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