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Looking at PS4 Pro, I see no reason to think the designers looked at supporting the rest of the system. As I said elsewhere, it's an upgrade of easy wins. More GPU - easy. Slightly higher CPU clock - easy. Slightly more BW - easy. Nothing about balancing workloads to achieve a target. No calculating GPU requirements and trying to get RAM and CPU to match in a balanced system. It's just PS4 on steroids. Scorpio OTOH is a new system architected around achieving a certain goal.
I don't know, everything (bar memory) gets a 25%+ boost (25% is not something I'd call slightly more, especially with people throwing around 50% as substantial) - seems to me it was quite clear, they wanted a quick and dirty 4K and to steady framerates. Scorpio may be built with a goal, but one of those is to support XBO so it will be held back unless MS allow exclusives we'll likely see 4K @ native (which is not a big win over the Pro). They only thing they could do is upgrade the CPU to get to 60FPS - this is hinted in at the reveal '60 frames, no compromises' - but we get 60 FPS today anyway so without knowing they mean native 4k @ 60 it means very little.
MS could do a lot worse than reveal more info about Scorpio in the next couple of weeks before Pro launches now that we know exactly what Pro will offer and they will know how to word the advantages of Scorpio.
I didn't say slightly more; I said easy. If the only way to get 25% more BW was to refactor the entire system memory, they'd have kept the same BW. But chuck in a bit faster GDDR5, and a up the CPU clock because you can because you shrunk it, and you've got an easy upgrade.
We all know if there was a real target for 4K, or even 1440p, the whole system would have to be enhanced in a balanced way. 230% more GPU coupled with 25% more CPU and BW clearly isn't a top-to-bottom architected solution, unless PS4 had a massive excess of both of these resources... so Sony just put out a better system based on what a cheaply better system could be, and leave it to the devs to work out how to use it. No real targets, no real ambitions other than to get a PS4+ that makes games better to some degree somehow. About the only clearly designed feature is HDR, which only needs modifying the output (and was supported in PS4, so not even an engineering effort for 4Pro).
The goal of the Ps4 Pro is very clear, it is offering an improved experience at 4k. Not altered, improved. Meaning that 30 fps games which fail to hit the target often should be able to do so on the Pro. At that price point there's not much they could've done imo. And improving the GPU significantly over the CPU or the mem b/w is not only easier for Sony but also developers/publishers that have invested resources/time on the current Ps4 (the systems strongest point being the GPU, like the Pro). And the biggest factor in increasing native resolution is the GPU, if PC gaming is anything to go by. I think the pro is balanced to offer a similar experience to Ps4 but with an increased native resolution. It is not balanced for 1080p output, although there are ways to use the extra GPU power at 1080p, supersampling being the easy route.
tl;dr The Pro is a Ps4 running games at 4k with more stable framerate and it is balanced around that
tl;dr The Pro is a Ps4 running games at 4k with more stable framerate and it is balanced around that
lol, you said slightly - twice.
How about this built in h/w upscaler? Seems Sony knew what to tarket to get the 'poor mans' 4K. I agree they went for 'as cheap as possible' - what you don't want to do is over engineer a product and make it to expensive and kill it off, or upset those that buy it buy revealing PS5 2/3 years later. Also keeping evreything close to PS4 is surely a help to devs?
And unbalanced? How about Scorpio, if Pro is unbalanced then what is Scorpio? Seems in Scorpio everything is ~50% more than Pro so I guess that's a unbalanced mess too!?
Michellstar
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As much as this table is informative, there are many areas of both designs XBO and scorpio that make this flops comparison incomplete.
Is the small ESRAM and the low main bandwith a bottleneck to reach better res??
Are 16 rops enough?
I mean, many unknowns at this point
You're right, in my description of the upgrades. Yeah, I'd call 25% slight in the scope of the whole system.
Here's one way to look at it. If PS4 is a balanced system for 1080p, where 1.8TF was coupled with 8 Jag cores at 1.6 GHz and GDDR5 BW at 176 GBs, then a ratio of 1.8 : 1.6 : 1.8 is 'balanced'. 4Pro is in the ratio of 4.2 : 2.1 : 2.2.
Normalised for easier comparison 1 : 0.9 : 1 vs 1 : 0.5 : 0.5
Does that look like a balanced system to you? Either PS4 is wholely imbalanced with too much BW and CPU power for the GPU, or 4Pro is imbalanced with not enough of the other resources. Although I'm sure the real situation is far more complex than that as resources don't necessarily scale linearly. But I think it pretty self evident that a 230% increase in GPU processing potential with a 25% increase in BW to feed it data is a highly imbalanced upgrade.
Well we always knew the PS4s weak spot was CPU so it's a no-brainer that this is less balanced, however it doesn't change things so much that the machine won't benefit - hell we should see games like InFamous and LoU now locked 60FPS at the very least, which is a nice boost and shouldn't cost anything to implement. Likewise it should be pretty easy for devs to patch to 'fake 4K'. I guess the proof will come out, personally I am expecting a nice improvement and more stable framerates and as I'm getting PSVR I think it'll be more apparent...we shall see. Likewise with Scorpio which shares a similar imbalance GPU to B/W.
I don't think you get the point of the Pro. The CPU doesn't need to be anything beyond what it is, a way for Ps4 games to run more smoothly in CPU limited cases, there won't be major changes between the Ps4 version and the Pro version in CPU heavy tasks, if any at all (lazy devs etc.). So to summarize.
What Sony want: A Ps4 that is capable of running the same games at the same settings at a higher resolution. How can they achieve this?
- CPU? Not a problem, this is not a new console, it is supposed to run the same games, bump in clock speed due to new process, will help with some games
- Mem Bandwidth: Must be bumped due to the increase in resolution, memory compression also another way of solving the issue
- GPU: Absolutely must be increased for the purpose of running the same games at a higher resolution
Similarly, the Ps4 pro doesn't have to be balanced, it's not a new console, it'll play the same games as the Ps4 with extra bells and whistles. Features may change depending on the game, but that is up to the developers. The main draw for this system is to play Ps4 games with increased IQ at a premium of $50 (1TB slim to 1TB pro). I don't get what is so confusing about that.
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I'm not confused and you're not contradicting me.
Everything you've said here, I agree with. But the point is, the design of PS4 wasn't to hit a particular target like "we want to run PS4 games at xx resolution and yy fps." It was to offer an amped up PS4 that'll enables more, in some way, worth some people upgrading. So it's not a 'balanced system' because it's not a new console because Sony weren't going any great engineer lengths to make a fabulous well engineered product. It's "how much extra can we put in at minimum cost, and what can devs do with that?"My point is only really against the notion that PS4Pro is designed to hit a target or a system in the same way PS3 or XB360 or PS4 or XB1 was. Every one of these machines was painstakingly designed, weighing up possibilities and wanting a great CPU/GPU combo that'd make an awesome system. 4Pro is just a PS4 with an easy bump up.
Oh, and "Mem Bandwidth: Must be bumped due to the increase in resolution, memory compression also another way of solving the issue" - we've learnt PS4 has this.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1943430/
Because PS4 was a carefully designed, balanced system pushing tech.
And unless Microsoft decide to completely abandon the X1 userbase (which is possible but not probable) Scorpio is also "doomed" to be imbalanced because it has to take into account the X1 architecture and support it fully. That's the thing with mid-gen refresh consoles, they are mostly luxury items, not supposed to stand on their own. That doesn't mean they can't be great value on their own though.
Edit: Some slides from the polaris presentation, should be included in the Pro GPU
Showing greater gains with DCC than GCN 1.3 (Fury X)
Source is the article from anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeon-rx-480-preview/1
Edit: Some slides from the polaris presentation, should be included in the Pro GPU
Showing greater gains with DCC than GCN 1.3 (Fury X)
Source is the article from anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeon-rx-480-preview/1
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So what is it about the XO that would cause the Scorpio to be unbalanced if you had to support it?
If your saying that you wouldn't be able to make say a hugely expansive open world game that you may have been if you only supported the scorpio, that that's fair enough, but that doesn't make the machine unbalanced.
Edit - Sorry this probably will derail thread. I don't think you can say because PS4P made certain decisions that MS's machine will be doomed architecturaly also?
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No, they promised repeatedly!
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