PS4 Pro Official Specifications (Codename NEO)

[Arwin]

Thanks, this game needs a thread. Especially VR wise it is just incredible, already on PS4.

 

[Karamazov]

This is interesting, Bound PSVR on pro will render twice more pixels + volumetric fog.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=220112635&postcount=40

Let's hope DC VR Will get the same treatment

 

[loekf]

Let's hope DC VR Will get the same treatment

I didn't find it that bad. When I briefly checked the Youtube videos of the developer of Bound, appearently Sony has a special SW render pipeline towards the PS VR. I hear him clearly say that you need more pixels towards the center. Guess you do some warping before throwing it to the displays in the headset. Then, I guess the PU box does some magic to put on your TV. Or... the magic is done in the PU. That's also possible.

More BW on the Pro makes sense. In Pro mode at 1080p, devs have to hit a 60 fps frame rate, but to do so have 2.3x the GPU bandwidth at their disposal.

 

[loekf]

Has there been any actual confirmation or even talk from Sony about whether Pro will have removable hard drive? I guess there's no reason to believe it won't..

By the looks of the back of it there does seem to be a removable area here:

Should be. I have a 2 TB Samsung Spinpoint here lying ready. Actually the same one MS uses in the 2 TB XB S. I am only suspicious of this drive due to the complaints about "beeping" once in a while. However, didn't see any XB S owners complain. I also have the new Seagate 2 TB FireCuda on pre-order (SSHD). I don't trust Seagate, so let's hope they work for a while.

If I'm not mistaken, the XB S also has a SATA3 i/f in the new SoC. I didn't see any mention of SATA3 for the new PS4 Slim SoC. That's a shrink version (16 nm vs. 28nm).

 

[chris1515]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...tation-4-pro-how-sony-made-a-4k-games-machine


Article about Mark Cerny presentation of PS4 Pro.

Some very interesting feature some will be in Vega architecture...

Buffer ID seems to be some custom Sony hardware.

Insomniac Games is drawing upon the work of Epic's Brian Karis and Timothy Lottes to create a 4K image from a four-million pixel jittered framebuffer in its new Spider-Man title. It believes the quality could exceed the results seen in checkerboarding with a similar overhead.

 

[iroboto]

Ugg. On a mobile phone here so can't make a well formatted post. But Cerny speaks to 4Pro hardware with his interview with the verge.

I must say, having finished reading the interview, I'm really left confused by their messaging here.

Tech bits: 4Pro has 2 GPUs.
Edit edit: stupid verge. 1 GPU. Turns off 1/2 CUs.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/20/...t=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

For the more than 700 or so existing PS4 games, Cerny said the goal was to ensure those titles played smoothly no matter what. That’s why the Pro incorporates an identical GPU. Because the new console has "the old GPU next to a mirror version of itself," Sony can support existing games with a simple trick: "We just turn off the second GPU," he said. Developers can patch these titles to boost graphics and performance in very subtle ways.

Wicked!

But unless you have a 4K television, the difference will not be substantial.

? This is painful.


Edit: phew. A tech focused interview.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...tation-4-pro-how-sony-made-a-4k-games-machine

 

[3dilettante]

The Digital Foundry thread has an article that describes it more as a mirroring of resources. Later discussion still treats the whole complex as the same GPU.
That context makes it sound that the bulk of the execution resources are mirrored, but they aren't considered separate GPUs.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/d...tation-4-pro-how-sony-made-a-4k-games-machine

Also, there is 2x FP16. Earlier discussion of delta color compression somehow being present in the original PS4 are contradicted by this latest disclosure.
There's some new items like an ID buffer, which intrigues me because that might play into future rendering methods that buffer what triangle goes to which pixel before rendering. If that can be applied in-frame, that might point to what later AMD GPUs could be doing, or what future renderers with a deferred pass can do.

edit: citing original post https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1948973/

 

[djskribbles]

Also, not DF but: http://ca.ign.com/articles/2016/10/20/playstation-4-pro-has-an-extra-1gb-of-ram

He went on to note that on the standard PS4, when moving from application to a game, that application remains resonant in the system memory to allow for fast swapping between the two. With PS4 Pro, that application is moved to the extra 1GB of RAM when swapping to a game, freeing up nearly an entire gigabyte of the console's remaining 8GB of GDDR5 RAM.

 

[Clukos]

http://ign.com/articles/2016/10/20/playstation-4-pro-has-an-extra-1gb-of-ram

Should be nice for the OS, combined with sata 3 support this will be a significant improvement in terms of the user experience.

 

[iroboto]

Ignore verge entirely.

This is now confirmed :: will come back to format. Phone is gonna die.

One of the features appearing for the first time is the handling of 16-bit variables - it's possible to perform two 16-bit operations at a time instead of one 32-bit operation," he says, confirming what we learned during our visit to VooFoo Studios to check out Mantis Burn Racing.

 

[Clukos]

That DF article is something. Interesting how they handle Ps4 back-compat.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

So:
-1 GB of DDR3 added for apps in the backgroung freeing up 1 GB of GDRR5, giving half for UI in 4k and half for games.
-two Vega arch features: hardware scheduler and 2 half precision ops instead of 1 single precission making it in fact a 16 bits 8,4 tflops machine.
-custom Sony's ID buffer with spatial info of objects in frames that allows better spacial and temporal antialiasing techniques plus checkerboard or other upscaling techniques.
-Other customs features(multi-res support for VR?) will be explained in other articles.
-New gen will be a clean sheet with new CPU and memory arch.So it will be Zen+HBM whatever.

It seems like smart design decissions were made.That two Vega features can punch this GPU way above its weight.
And that ID buffer will be abused by devs for incredible techniques.

 

[scf]

That DF article is something. Interesting how they handle Ps4 back-compat.

He said they kinda turn off a half of the gpu

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Insomniac Games ... in its new Spider-Man title

Was that known before??

 

[I.S.T.]

Insomniac Games ... in its new Spider-Man title

Was that known before??

Yes, it's a Sony exclusive one.

 

[Newguy]

Some res info on games:

"Days Gone, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn all render up to 2160p with checkerboarding, super-sampling down to 1080p on full HD displays, while the Lara Croft title has multiple modes with explicit 1080p support"

"Watch Dogs 2, Killing Floor 2, InFamous and Mass Effect Andromeda all use 1800p checkerboarding"

"Shadow of Mordor uses native rendering at dynamic resolution. The resolution can vary broadly but generally it's 80 to 90 per cent of 4K"

Once again a good read.

 

[Shin Ra]

The ID BUFFER.

"We'd really like to know where the object and triangle boundaries are when performing spatial anti-aliasing, but contrast, Z [depth] and normal are all imperfect solutions," Cerny says. "We'd also like to track the information from frame to frame because we're performing temporal anti-aliasing. It would be great to know the relationship between the previous frame and the current frame better. Our solution to this long-standing problem in computer graphics is the ID buffer. It's like a super-stencil. It's a separate buffer written by custom hardware that contains the object ID."

Would this completely eliminate the need for neighbourhood clipping, without TAA trailing artefacts?

 

[Ryan Smith]

"Days Gone, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Horizon Zero Dawn all render up to 2160p with checkerboarding, super-sampling down to 1080p on full HD displays

Combining downsampling with upsampling/reconstruction seems like a very questionable idea to me.

 

[djskribbles]

Does that necessarily mean they upsample then downsample? Maybe it's simply downsampled from the native rendering resolution.

 

[chris1515]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/283611/Inside_the_PlayStation_4_Pro_with_Mark_Cerny.php

https://www.engadget.com/2016/10/20/ps4-pro-mark-cerny-interview-hardware/

Other details on the two other article. Knack has a PS4 Pro mode. He gives some details about the time needed to implement PS4 Pro mode.