Sony Playstation Meeting September 7 2016 [PS4 Slim, PS4 Pro, Rumors, Speculations, and News]

[eastmen]

Thanks for the quick replies. I still don't see that being enough for the general public to sit a year out.

This time next year though, MS can be pushing a game that looks good or better than the competition. That's a way's away though.

Still feels like Genesis/SNES to me.

I am sure there are a lot of Sony fans who will buy a ps4 pro this year and a lot of people who are looking for a first console and can opt for a ps4 slim , pro or xbox one s . However Scorpio is going to be more powerful and will receive the best ports so those who are serious about multiplayer and having the best console experience will go scorpio . Those who want the best console vr experience may (depending on what ms does ) choose a scorpio also.

I also think far and large streamers will want the best console and that will push the conversation with those under them .

I think ps4 pro is a weird half step same ram , same cpu and that will be a sticking point.

IF scorpio goes zen with vega and offers double the ram it will be a huge power difference more than the 1.8tflops would tell. The ram alone will allow for much better image quality. We also don't know what else MS will add. Will they put in a 1TB SSD ? Then loading times will be greatly reduced. No more discs (this is going to drive MR FOX nuts that I bought this up !!! ) then the console could be much smaller and so on and so forth

anyway i'm not sure if its the right thread to talk about it .

 

[bunge]

I think ps4 pro is a weird half step same ram , same cpu and that will be a sticking point.

Agreed 100%. I hope MS has a rabbit in the hat like PSVR or a Kinect that is successful of course. Not Kinect but some edge. Bandwidth alone should be a huge advantage.

Sorry if this is off topic. Just thinking a PS4 Pro is "good enough" for three years until the next bombshell invitation only media event.

 

[zed]

However Scorpio is going to be more powerful and will receive the best ports so those who are serious about multiplayer and having the best console experience will go scorpio .

So you're saying you don't care about multiplayer and having the best console experience? As you got the less powerful hardware this time

 

[eastmen]

Agreed 100%. I hope MS has a rabbit in the hat like PSVR or a Kinect that is successful of course. Not Kinect but some edge. Bandwidth alone should be a huge advantage.

Sorry if this is off topic. Just thinking a PS4 Pro is "good enough" for three years until the next bombshell invitation only media event.

I think we might see an Oculus headset using a new type of Kinect imo

So you're saying you don't care about multiplayer and having the best console experience? As you got the less powerful hardware this time

I have a i7 3770 with 32 gigs of ram and a radeon r9 290 .... so I do care a lot lol

 

[djskribbles]

DF: Three Hours with the PS4 Pro

I went into the PlayStation Meeting today as a sceptic, believing that the hardware may not be up to the task of powering a 4K display. The good news is that several hours later, I emerged from the event impressed with the quality of the experience and respectful of the wizardry utilised to make this GPU punch above its weight. However, fundamentally, there's little doubt that PlayStation 4 Pro is going to be a tough sell. Traditional gaming media simply can't capture and communicate the quality of the imagery I saw today, as there's no real way to showcase HDR meaningfully. And this is actually a key component of the PlayStation 4 Pro experience. 4K is impressive and a worthy upgrade in its own right, but HDR takes it to the next level.

More in the article.

 

[trainplane]

Surprised by the lack of a UHD drive. Sony might not have expected MS to have included one to the XBox S but could not do anything about it by that point anyway. I know some say they wanted to hit $400 but Sony could have eaten the cost initially until component parts came down to regular BR drive levels, considering this will be sold for the next 3-4 years. MS thought it was worth it to eat the cost. Even if it's not a heavily used feature, it's a big marketing bullet point for the XBox S being the cheapest UHD player out there. It really seemed like Sony got caught flat footed on this.

 

[BRiT]

Well we know they certainly didn't spend the 3 hours watching Superman vs Batman UHD 4K BluRay movie or any other UHD 4K BluRay movie.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Looking around online I've seen a lot of confusion about HDR. A lot of people don't seem to realize they need an HDR tv. They seem to think all 4k tvs are also HDR capable. I've seen people commenting that all games on PS4 Pro will be 60fps. I've seen people commenting that Xbox One S is a better deal than PS4 Pro, not seeming to realize the power gap. I've seen people who think the PS4 slim is getting an upgrade to 4k, not just HDR. Not to mention people that still don't understand what HDR is, even though it was described in good detail in the reveal. Gamers are a confused bunch, always.

It's a tough situation to manage. They could put up a slide that says 1 + 1 = 2, and I'm sure it would get twisted and distorted by half-literate gamers and second hand information.

Edit: Oh, and the whole checkerboard rendering thing. I've seen comments where people seem to believe these kinds of algorithms will be exclusive to PS4 Pro. Saw one comment on twitter where a person said it would be better to play games on PS4 Pro than a high-end PC because you won't have to "brute force 4k."

Edit: Just read that Digital Foundry article. So the GPU does have some hardware that enables their "checkerboard" upscale. Very interesting. Wonder if that's a Sony feature or a future AMD feature. Seems like some other things as well.

 

[temesgen]

So you're saying you don't care about multiplayer and having the best console experience? As you got the less powerful hardware this time

Sony was pretty adamant that PS4 Pro would not offer an advantage in multiplayer over core PS4, I'm not sure what MS would do but this isn't a reason to buy a PS4 Pro instead of a core PS4.

 

[eastmen]

Looking around online I've seen a lot of confusion about HDR. A lot of people don't seem to realize they need an HDR tv. They seem to think all 4k tvs are also HDR capable. I've seen people commenting that all games on PS4 Pro will be 60fps. I've seen people commenting that Xbox One S is a better deal than PS4 Pro, not seeming to realize the power gap. I've seen people who think the PS4 slim is getting an upgrade to 4k, not just HDR. Not to mention people that still don't understand what HDR is, even though it was described in good detail in the reveal. Gamers are a confused bunch, always.

It's a tough situation to manage. They could put up a slide that says 1 + 1 = 2, and I'm sure it would get twisted and distorted by half-literate gamers and second hand information.

Edit: Oh, and the whole checkerboard rendering thing. I've seen comments where people seem to believe these kinds of algorithms will be exclusive to PS4 Pro. Saw one comment on twitter where a person said it would be better to play games on PS4 Pro than a high-end PC because you won't have to "brute force 4k."

Edit: Just read that Digital Foundry article. So the GPU does have some hardware that enables their "checkerboard" upscale. Very interesting. Wonder if that's a Sony feature or a future AMD feature. Seems like some other things as well.

well if you want a uhd player and a console then yea the xbox one s might be the better deal $300 for both. The ps4 pro would be what $400 + $500 for a uhd player ? however I don't think uhd will be that popular .

As for the checkerboard rendering , I bet that will come to all of AMD's gpus post Polaris . Sony said that they had features past Polaris . My guess is its something from vega brought down to the pro.

What will be interesting is if MS has the same thing

 

[3dilettante]

As for the checkerboard rendering , I bet that will come to all of AMD's gpus post Polaris . Sony said that they had features past Polaris . My guess is its something from vega brought down to the pro.

Checkerboard rendering has already been applied to GPUs pre-Polaris, and various ways of using reconstruction/projection/multisampling don't need AMD-anything.
Sony seems to be emphasizing it enough that it might have had tweaks put in place to make it more straightforward to implement or more efficient.

What will be interesting is if MS has the same thing

Perhaps we should hope that it does. The alternative, when we see a Polaris generation swamped by multiple more advanced Pascal chips up and down the range, is that AMD is sputtering out any number of chips, each with some set of special customizations that virtually everbody else cannot use and infrastructure good only for one platform, and yet despite all this hopping across fabs, SOCs, and numeric labels of GCN the overall distance travelled feels oddly short.

 

[Rangers]

Edit: Just read that Digital Foundry article. So the GPU does have some hardware that enables their "checkerboard" upscale. Very interesting.

I'm very skeptical of this, just because any such changes would be so difficult, taking years to plan and implement. Maybe just something like some more on chip cache? That's about the most could see.

I do find it kind of funny how games like Quantum Break, (especially), Rainbow 6, and KZ Shadow fall were ripped for using the same "checkerboard" techniques that now seem, to just be passed off as no scandal or a positive. Not that I think it should be a scandal, it's going to be the future at 4k for sure even on Scorpio. But at the end of the day, it's a game not rendering at native display resolution, which before was somehow morally bad.

It's good if it gets people more accepting though, but I wonder if it will. The resolution returns get more diminishing all the time (well, excepting VR), so it should.

Perhaps we should hope that it does. The alternative, when we see a Polaris generation swamped by multiple more advanced Pascal chips up and down the range,

Err, dont see that. Only issue with Polaris is AMD doesn't have Vega out yet and apparently wont for a long time. Polaris 10 is highly competitive in it's bracket, as usual for AMD.

 

[Globalisateur]

I'm very skeptical of this, just because any such changes would be so difficult, taking years to plan and implement. Maybe just something like some more on chip cache? That's about the most could see.

I do find it kind of funny how games like Quantum Break, (especially), Rainbow 6, and KZ Shadow fall were ripped for using the same "checkerboard" techniques that now seem, to just be passed off as no scandal or a positive. Not that I think it should be a scandal, it's going to be the future at 4k for sure even on Scorpio. But at the end of the day, it's a game not rendering at native display resolution, which before was somehow morally bad.

It's good if it gets people more accepting though, but I wonder if it will. The resolution returns get more diminishing all the time (well, excepting VR), so it should.



Err, dont see that. Only issue with Polaris is AMD doesn't have Vega out yet and apparently wont for a long time. Polaris 10 is highly competitive in it's bracket, as usual for AMD.

Neither Quantum Break nor KZ are using that technique. We could easily pixel count Quantum Break at 720p and the game always looked as blurry as a 720p game to me. There is no smart reconstruction in QB technique.

 

[London Geezer]

Do you want to know that in quantifiable numbers or in how large of an e-penis you could have for having something more powerful than your neighbor?

Regards,
SB

Both of course!

 

[eastmen]

Neither Quantum Break nor KZ are using that technique. We could easily pixel count Quantum Break at 720p and the game always looked as blurry as a 720p game to me. There is no smart reconstruction in QB technique.

QB is a beautiful looking game in motion. It looks even better at higher resolutions on the pc.

I'm not sure what the difference between the checker board and QBs methods are but I could see why the checkerboard one looks as good as it does when I've seen qb in practice

 

[Scott_Arm]

The quantum break reconstruction breaks down when the camera is moving. It only really works when the camera is basically still. The methods used in rainbow six siege and killzone shadowfall, and what's talked about for PS4 Pro, will work at all times.

 

[rabidrabbit]

Was expecting the PS4 Pro to feature also an UHD Blu-ray drive. Though I don't own a 4K TV, it would've been nice for future proofing.
I'm not sure 4K streaming services are really an an alternative to 4K UltraHD Blu-ray discs. At least where I live, even 1080p movies are better available on discs if you want to watch something that's not at least a year old movie.
What recent 4K blu-ray movies are also available for streaming, for example in US? Is Revenant available, Deadpool, Martian...?

 

[sebbbi]

I do find it kind of funny how games like Quantum Break, (especially), Rainbow 6, and KZ Shadow fall were ripped for using the same "checkerboard" techniques that now seem, to just be passed off as no scandal or a positive. Not that I think it should be a scandal, it's going to be the future at 4k for sure even on Scorpio. But at the end of the day, it's a game not rendering at native display resolution, which before was somehow morally bad.

KZ Shadow fall used scanline interlacing (even/odd scanlines on alternative frames). This is better than 1080i (on video), because game engines have motion vector buffer and depth buffer available. This extra data allows much better reconstruction compared to simple de-interlacing techniques that work purely on color data. Checkerboard technique (introduced by Rainbow Six Siege) is a improved version of the scanline interlacing. Checkerboard pattern improves the locality of the data. For each pixel, you have 100% correct data available at 4 neighbor pixels (-X, +X, -Y, +Y). Scanlane interlacing on the other hand has no neighbor data in the X direction at all. Checkerboard reduces interlacing artifacts and fail cases (occlusion) result in less blurry result.

Quantum Break doesn't use checkerboarding or interlacing. It reconstructs the final 1080p image from four 720p images (temporal rotated grid pattern). Check out this presentation by Tatu Aalto (esp slide 50): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023870/Towards-Cinematic-Quality-Antialiasing-in

 

[Jubei]

Thanks for the quick replies. I still don't see that being enough for the general public to sit a year out.

This time next year though, MS can be pushing a game that looks good or better than the competition. That's a way's away though.

Still feels like Genesis/SNES to me.

I think sales and performance are two different arguments. Xbox is dead outside the US, Scorpio could put them back in the race in that region but unless Scorpio is a gamechanger, and i dont mean in terms of specs but simply a whole new experience then Pro is going to outsell it fairly easily outside the US and maybe the UK, the only x-factor here is that for the first time we have digital sales similar to Steam and iOS/Android, people might not be willing to abandon hundreds of dollars worth of investments for slightly shinier multiplat titles. Its going to be interesting to see how this plays out. But when it comes to performance, there is zero doubt that Scorpio is going to be far more powerful, how that power is used because of the Xbox 1 anchor will remain to be seen

A year is also a very long time for Sony to be alone in the performance segment. I do hope Xbox bounces back though, Slim being 299 is just greedy, Apple level greedy

 

[antic604]

While I'm on the fence whether or not to upgrade to PS4Pro (I've no 4k TV and not planning on buying one soon) I have to say I really like Sony's strategy here.

They've offered a cheap, much more powerful console (2,3x PS4, 3x X1) a year in advance before Microsoft, allowing for people with 4k TVs to leverage their new, shiny hardware. What I find particularly smart is that "year in advance" bit - for a year they'll be able to claim the top spot in terms of console IQ and performance boosting the sales and when Scorpio finally shows up, MS will really have difficulty conveying how much better of an experience 6TFlops delivers - I mean it still won't be enough to drive most AAA games at native 4k and actually showing how much better Scorpio's 1900p vs. PS4Pro's 1600p (or whatever the difference) upscaled to 4k is will be a tough sell, especially on Twitch, Youtube and internet blogs. And even on 4k TVs, the difference will likely be minutiae and perceivable only by people really knowing what to look for.

The only puzzling things for me were:
- PS4 Slim's pricing - I thought they should have gone for 249$ to differentiate it more from the Pro,
- omission of UHD Bluray support - personally I don't care (I have literally 1 Bluray movie...) but a lot of people do,