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

Indeed, rendering at anything other than native resolution of the display is always less than ideal, but I think that the higher we go the less important it gets ("diminishing returns" of display technology, if you will). For 1080p TVs PS3/360 games at 720p or below were really hard to swallow, but currently X1's typical 900p is already a significant step up and lots of people claim to see no difference vs. PS4s native 1080p. With higher res displays - 4k, 8k and beyond - it will get even harder to see those differences, if the algorithms are good enough and "pixel quality" increases (I mean new rendering, post-processing and anti-aliasing techniques, making X1's 720p game looking much better than X360's 720p game).

 

i play INSIDE at 540p on 1080p screen and it looks superb. So i understand that argument you illustrates

 

First things first, I am disappointed that the PS4 Pro doesn't include a UHD BR drive, to me thats just plain short sightedness and obviously down to cost.

Scorpio on paper is going to be significantly more powerful that even the PS4 Pro. Over the course, it should receive the best looking/best performing or both ports of multiplatform games.

I also agree that the PS4 Pro is a weird half step, although I don't think it will be a sticking point seeing as it's come in at a really low price.

Now lets not get carried away with 1TB SSD's and huge amounts of RAM and fantastically fast processors in the Scorpio. Unless you want to see the Scorpio releasing at $800. Lets get one thing straight, the Scorpio will be a pretty big machine if its gonna include half of what it rumoured to have. And thats before we even talk about the price. I'm sure Sony made the Pro as cheap as it could, hence the lack of UHD as that would have pushed it over $400. If the Scorpio is going to have Zen/Vega, 12GB super fast RAM and potentially 2TB drive or smaller SSD, then it's going to be considerably more expensive than $400....I'm think nearer $500-$600. That is unless they come out with 2 versions. But that's a talking point for another thread and another day maybe.

Anyway, having the more powerful console is one thing, but having the software support is the most important thing. PS4 is outselling Xbox 2:1 WW ansd thats before the $50 reduction. Add into the mix that the PS4 Pro is the same price as the 2TB Xbox One S and is coming out in 2 months time and will more than likely have a solid 12 months of sales before Scorpio hits the market. We could see sales of Xbox slow to a craw over the next 6 months and I fully expect to see Xbox One sales being next to nothing from March/April onwards.

I fully expect 55m combined PS4/PS4Pro sales by the end of this year compared with 28m for Xbox One. By the time the Scorpio releases in November 2017, we could be talking 70-80m PS4's in total WW. When Scorpio releases and is to be fully compatible with Xbox One, will 3rd party studios continue to spend the time on ports etc....I am not sure. Oh well we will see in due course.

 

I was hoping (waiting) that PS4 Pro would have an UHD drive for my living room and man-cave purposes. I guess it's time to shop for some good UHD blu-ray standalone players.

 

It's going to be interesting to see how well PS4 Pro sells. Less than 10% of North American households have UHD TVs, and not all of them are even HDR capable. Market research expects 50% UHD adaptation to happen at 2020. And these are North American numbers. FullHD TVs got popular first in North America, it took several years for other continents to catch up.

The shown PS4 Pro games used the extra hardware resources mostly to hit as close to 4K output (+HDR output). 90%+ of customers have 1080p TVs (holiday this year). Downsampling from 4K down to 1080p gives you nice antialiasing. However if that's the only difference in most games, it's going to be hard to convince most consumers to upgrade. As a gamer, I would like 30 fps -> 60 fps upgrade more. But I understand that it is hard to double the frame rate, as the CPU received only a minor boost. And unfortunately double frame rate is not as sexy as 4K

 

How? And why? Unless you play on some very weak PC?

And even so, that actually contradicts what I've been trying to argue

 

Judging by this painfully boring PK (the silence in the auditorium was deafening), there seems to be virtually no reason to buy the bloody thing unless you have a 4K TV or maybe VR. Yeah, Shadows of Mordor supersampled. Iirc, SoM had pretty damn good image quality anyway.

 

Yes, very good points. The question is, how much of CPU work can be offloaded to GPU, to enable the 60fps boost to 30fps titles? Also - quite weirdly - Jaguar clock speed is the only info that's missing from published specs, so there's hoping it got increased above the rumoured 2.1Ghz

Unless you - as a developer - know for a fact it is 2.1Ghz.

 

It will be interesting to see how 3rd party tiles end up between PS4pro and Scorpio.

If the checkerboard rendering is hardware and minimal design changes it means the game engine will not need to do this itself and therefore possibly wont do it on Scorpio. Then you have more TF but far more pixels to be rendered.

 

I get that they couldn't have pushed 60fps as a exciting feature mostly because the slightly overclocked CPU prevents them to claim 60fps games instead of 30fps on PS4.

But there is a thing called synergy. They should have used freesync through HDMI (it already exists and is basically free) on their own screens (they design and sell gaming screens for their living!) in order to push judder-free fluctuating framerates as a new and exciting new feature. Instead they pushed something that nobody has, like you said, and that not true gamer would want instead of adaptive framerate which is the true future of console gaming.

They bet on HDR when they should have bet on freesync. Retrospectively with the Xbox HDR and UHD ready their HDR bet is even more a mistake because their premium machine can't even read UHD HDR discs.

 

Scorpio can do checkerboard rendering or whatever in software. It just means a little less overhead on PS4Pro

 

Nobody has a Freesync display and far few people will be getting Freesync displays in the living room over the coming years than UHD displays.

 

Well if the first provider of consoles in the world continues to inexplicably boycott adaptive framerate (on their consoles and their screens) we sure won't get freesync as default feature on our consoles before a long long time.

 

They sold stand-alone BR players even after launching PS3, sooo...

 

Well the presentation didn't look so well because no presenter looked the least bit enthusiastic about anything. Everything was "old news" to whomever had been paying attention for the last couple of months.
The Slim announcement was borderline funny because Andrew House sounded like a bored public worker with a bureaucratic job telling you what stamps you need to get in order to get the documentation you need from him.
"This is the Slim. It is smaller, consumes less and costs $299. Bye. NEEEXT!"

The only one sounding a bit excited was maybe the guy from Activision who went there to show the Space-CoD that everybody hates since the first teaser came out. I guess the guys from that studio definitely need to show some enthusiasm because no one else will.

From what I could tell, for "regular" 1080p TVs we'll have (at least) the first parties bringing substantial IQ upgrades while others will simply do supersampling and/or higher framerates.
For example, Horizon Zero Dawn had denser foliage and IIRC higher resolution shadows on the Pro.

I also think Freesync being free should have been included, though I wonder how many people 1) play on a computer monitor and 2) play on a Freesync TV (which AFAIK only Wasabi Mango makes so far?).
As for sales, I think the Slim will come down to ~$250 during the holidays, or at least $300 with one or two AAA games. That should distribute the sales a bit more. Otherwise the Pro will outsell the Slim by a lot, IMO.

 

TV manufacturers have to support it too...

 

of course it can, my point was if a game does not use this rendering setup now will they just for Scorpio if we assume the Sony technology is just an addition to their existing rendering setup. Ie the overhead is not a flop difference but numerous man hours/months and so will all titles adopt this or will we see interesting comparisons going forward.

Of course the machine to benefit most from this technique is possibly the Original Xbox given its already struggling to hit full HD so perhaps it will be more widely adopted.

 

Hm, the problem I see is splitting the online player base: that seems to be a console exclusive problem.

Neither system will upgrade to 60Hz, even Scorpio. As this would be an unfair avantage in online play. Old games might get a 60Hz update for the SP part, if even possible.

What I hope/think will happen over time is that all games on all system will have 60Hz as a target from all devs: In case of PS4 and PS4 pro, this would solve the CPU issue and at the same time give the PS4 pro version possibilities to upgrade the percieved graphics or stabilise the framerate.

It could very well be imo, that these half console cycle strategy causes a trend to 60Hz gaming on console.

Until this happens, I am with London Boy and wonder, if there will be a benefit at all when I buy the PS4 pro, while keeping my plasma panasonic 1080p tv?

 

but how would they sell that to main stream (which is the target for consoles). You can see a bigger screen, a higher resolution screen, maybe even believe to see HDR (although I'm worried people will mix that up with the HDR tone mapping of photo app toys).
but if you place two TVs, one with adaptive framerate, one running vsynced, no normal customer will really see a difference. once you explain and proof it, they might see it, but won't buy a new TV just for that reason. Marketing can sell 100Hz 200Hz TVs, but just because people have some value in numbers. but freesync? (Don't get me wrong, I value that, I've a g-sync monitor on my list ).

the HDR firmware is a really really nice thing, tho. I buy consoles because I know I'll be able to play all games in nicest quality till the generation dies. I'm looking forward to HDR.
I'm not bothered with PS4 Pro as I don't own a 4k projector (4k projectors start at 7k euro). But if there would be games that look graphically inferior or even stutter (like games on the old 3ds), that would make me throw out the PS4. I don't want to buy a PS4.5 just to buy a PS4.75 some years later to be able to play games properly.

 

For multiplayer games, PS4 and PS4 Pro will have to play the games at the same FPS; this will apply to both the Xbox One and Scorpio as well.

What this may do though is push developers to have 60fps as standard on both PS4 and Xbox One. Yes it will mean that visuals may have to take a hit, but in general it will be good for everyone going forward.

At the conference yesterday, there was too much emphasis on 4K and the benefits on higher resolution for gaming, but it seems that's not the only advantage we will see going forward. According to DF, the latest Tomb Raider will have 2 separate Neo/Pro options. One for 4K fidelity and one for 1080p and more geometry etc. This is the smart way forward, and essentially if all developers move towards a 60fps version of online gaming then we should see big differences with the Pro and Scorpio when we look at the 1080p version.

On a negative point, especially for Xbox One's is that because of the backwards compatibility with Scorpio, developers will need to produce multiplayer games that run well on the lowest common denominator, which happens to be the Xbox One. So going forward, we are likely to see one of two things on the Xbox One; 900p maximum resolution or reduced textures, geometry & effects or even a combination of all of them.