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PS4K information (~2x GPU power w/ clock+, new CPU, price, tent. Q1 2017)

fritolay

Member
Then, a $300 PS4 and $400 PS4K / Neo. I was only trying to let Neo seem to have more of a premium price without increasing its price, by cutting OG PS4.

Sony also has to sell PSVR, so I don't think PS4K can be more than $400. If it's $500, I could see a lot of people going 'forget it, I'll wait for Scorpio'.

Sony's financials are not too good. They need all the income they can get, and as market leader, they can do so.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
I would eat my hat if Neo benchmarks better than an upclocked 280x at 4.2 teraflops using games with Vulkan.

I edited my comment to make a better case, the PS4s bandwidth is about the 7850s plus the 20GB/s for the CPU, so ~150 vs 170.

So I don't think it's out of reason to say the Neo will benefit from the decreased bandwidth bottleneck as GCN1.1- did going to 4.

The 280X already saw the bandwidth limit removed. The PS4s GPU didn't, seeing as the only thing it has over the 7850, GCN1, goes to the CPU.
 

onQ123

Member
A bottleneck existed in the old chips, it was removed in the new ones and they do 40% better for the same core count and clock speed.

How is this misleading?

It's like the Fermi cards, they got memory capacity limited. If performance is X in games, you could say "no no, test only games where they won't be capacity bound"...But that makes no sense. It's the performance inherent to them, no matter where the bottleneck came from.



It's the output resolution. The internal load is an integer scale of it plus MSAA to smooth it over, and it can look good but not as sharp as native.

Rainbow Six did this, you should read through this:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-rainbow-six-siege-face-off

"So, at 1080p, we're technically seeing 960x540 with 2x MSAA."

Saying checkerboard rending is still rendering is like saying 1080i is still 1080p. You only render every other line each time, so no.

When your eyes see Rainbow 6 Siege what are you seeing only the 960x540 or are you seeing the 1920x1080 image that it's being used to help make?
 

Proelite

Member
I edited my comment to make a better case, the PS4s bandwidth is about the 7850s plus the 20GB/s for the CPU, so ~150 vs 170.

So I don't think it's out of reason to say the Neo will benefit from the decreased bandwidth bottleneck as GCN1.1- did going to 4.

The 280X already saw the bandwidth limit removed. The PS4s GPU didn't, seeing as the only thing it has over the 7850, GCN1, goes to the CPU.

280x is still GCN1. If it was GCN3, it would have only needed ~200 GB/S instead of 288GB/S.

Maybe PS4 GPU was bottlenecked. I am not arguing that.
 

Celcius

°Temp. member
Tomorrow is 3 more weeks until the unveil... what do you think are the chances of them releasing it the same week?
 

LordOfChaos

Member
When your eyes see Rainbow 6 Siege what are you seeing only the 960x540 or are you seeing the 1920x1080 image that it's being used to help make?

False dichotomy. You see something that was presented to the TV as 1080p for input purposes, but used nearest neighbour approximation and so ends up with something visibly worse than 1080p, but visibly better than 540p.

Did you read every bit of the article?

Let me ask you this, when your blu ray player passes a 1080p image to your 4K tv, and your 4K tv upscales it to 4K for native output, are you seeing 1080p or 4K?

The answer is, if your TV is good at its job, something better than 1080p but worse than 4K.


Boom, perfect tweet.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
Not the same one is scaling a image with less pixels to fit a TV with more pixels & the other is actually having the pixels to fit the TV.

Kindly scroll down to the developers own comparison of native vs checkerboard. Halfway through the slide deck.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022990/Rendering-Rainbow-Six-Siege

The checkerboard render can come close to native quality, but you can still tell it loses something in the approximation.

Ergo, with checkerboard you're neither seeing 540p nor 1080p in the R6 example. You see something better than one but worse than native.
 

onQ123

Member
Also by that logic, Dead Rising 3 on Xbox One is 1080p. Most of it is rendered at 720p which is used to "help" create the final 1080p image with 1080p UI elements.


Oh really so why is it that DF call DR3 720P


But call RSS on PS4 1080P

In terms of the console betas, the PS4 game arrives with a native 1080p resolution, while Xbox One is pared back to 900p. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-hands-on-with-rainbow-six-siege



Kindly scroll down to the developers own comparison of native vs checkerboard. Halfway through the slide deck.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022990/Rendering-Rainbow-Six-Siege

The checkerboard render can come close to native quality, but you can still tell it loses something in the approximation.

Ergo, with checkerboard you're neither seeing 540p nor 1080p in the R6 example. You see something better than one but worse than native.


You do understand that it's a 1920 x1080 frame made up of 4 960x540 frames & not 1 960x540 frame scaled across a 1920 x1080 frame right?
 

JJD

Member
Kindly scroll down to the developers own comparison of native vs checkerboard. Halfway through the slide deck.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022990/Rendering-Rainbow-Six-Siege

The checkerboard render can come close to native quality, but you can still tell it loses something in the approximation.

Ergo, with checkerboard you're neither seeing 540p nor 1080p in the R6 example. You see something better than one but worse than native.

On the slides you linked the dev states that there is no major quality impact. And that they still use checkerboard on PC to make possible to low end machines to hit 4K.

They even mentioned that they enabled it silently to see if anyone would notice.

Digital Foundry said that it works brilliantly. Besides DF I've never seen anyone complain about RS6 image quality.

If checkerboard makes it possible to Neo and Scorpio to achieve 4K resolution with current gen graphics I'd say this is a huge victory for console players and you will probably start to see more PC ports going down the same route. Who doesn't want their game to be able to run on a toaster?

Comparing checkerboard to outputting a 720p image to 1080p is not a smart argument.
 

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
On the slides you linked the dev states that there is no major quality impact. And that they still use checkerboard on PC to make possible to low end machines to hit 4K.

They even mentioned that they enabled it silently to see if anyone would notice.

Digital Foundry said that it works brilliantly. Besides DF I've never seen anyone complain about RS6 image quality.

If checkerboard makes it possible to Neo and Scorpio to achieve 4K resolution with current gen graphics I'd say this is a huge victory for console players and you will probably start to see more PC ports going down the same route. Who doesn't want their game to be able to run on a toaster?

Comparing checkerboard to outputting a 720p image to 1080p is not a smart argument.

Rainbow Six Siege's method completely changed my mind on reconstruction. I did not like Killzone Shadow Fall MP's implementation at all. I can only imagine that with a higher resolution base and a likely more mature method that it will have great results.
 

Lady Gaia

Member
False dichotomy. You see something that was presented to the TV as 1080p for input purposes, but used nearest neighbour approximation and so ends up with something visibly worse than 1080p, but visibly better than 540p.

Algorithms vary, but generally it's only using neighboring pixels for approximation when moving the camera or in areas where there's subject motion. For relatively static scenes it can pull detail from the prior frame (hence the general term "temporal reconstruction" for techniques like this.) The 540p target is used to trick the GPU into rendering half the pixels of 1080p in a checkerboard pattern by using 2xMSAA with a diagonal pattern.

It will generally be worse than 1080p in motion where our eyes aren't able to discern all the detail in any case, but can be indistinguishable from 1080p for static portions of scenes.

Let me ask you this, when your blu ray player passes a 1080p image to your 4K tv, and your 4K tv upscales it to 4K for native output, are you seeing 1080p or 4K?

By your own logic you're seeing something much lower than 1080p since H.264 encoded video uses content from prior frames, interpolation, and a zillion other tricks to reconstruct 1080p frames from much less actual recorded information. So which is it? Is Blu-ray not really 1080p, or is temporal reconstruction a valid technique for rendering to higher resolutions with lower cost?

... all that said, I don't think we'll see much in the way of native 4K AAA content. Upscaled 1800p looks like the sweet spot Sony is aiming for and it will be interesting to see how frequently that is achieved.
 

Hexa

Member
You do understand that it's a 1920 x1080 frame made up of 4 960x540 frames & not 1 960x540 frame scaled across a 1920 x1080 frame right?

You do understand that the other half frame isn't of the actual frame being rendered right? That it's post processed previous frames? That they're just approximating what it should be, just as most high quality upscalers do, just with more data to use for approximation.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
You do understand that it's a 1920 x1080 frame made up of 4 960x540 frames & not 1 960x540 frame scaled across a 1920 x1080 frame right?

Why do you never respond to what's directly addressed to you and always try to drop a one liner about something else?

If you followed my request to read about it starting halfway down that slide deck you'd know it's interpolating neighbouring pixels and rendering alternating ones each frame. Checkerboard rendering doesn't mean rendering four 960x540 panels and inserting them all side by side every single frame - that would save no work over native, apart from perhaps fitting in a smaller faster memory like tiled rendering.


I'll do the scrolling work for you -
nbdn3Gg.png


Eef3rKd.png


mmuaQbD.jpg





TV upscaling was just to illustrate why "4k or 1080p" was a straw man argument. The dev shows little regression in quality, but there is some. Like I said then, better than what the internal rendering resolution is, but worse than native.

I'm not saying the method is bad. I think it's great! I also don't think the Neo will do native 4K much, that's all.


Ok, bad example, just trying to find something close as this is usually not done in games.
 

Lady Gaia

Member
You do understand that it's a 1920 x1080 frame made up of 4 960x540 frames & not 1 960x540 frame scaled across a 1920 x1080 frame right?

You're confusing multiple techniques here. The whole point of rendering 540p with 2xMSAA is to get half of the pixels rendered, not one quarter. The other half are either interpolated or pulled from the prior frame. This isn't the same strategy as Sony's approach to rendering PS2 titles where the same frame is rendered multiple times.
 

onQ123

Member
You do understand that the other 960x540 frames aren't of the actual frame being rendered right? That they're post processed previous frames? That they're just approximating what it should be, just as most high quality upscalers do, just with more data to use for approximation.

Yes which is the point of checkerboard rendering in the 1st place.


but that final frame will have 1920x1080 pixels by using old pixels , new pixels & pixels computed from them both.
 
The Neo is a member of the PS4 family. It counts as a PS4 sale by any reasonable measure.
Someone expressed a concern that announcing Neo but not making it available would kill sales of vanilla PS4 this holiday. Okay, we'll ignore what Sony have been saying and assume Neo and PS4 actually are targeted at the same market segment… So we're assuming that if Sony say Neo will be available in March, then 1M folks who'd planned to buy a PS4 this holiday will get a Neo instead. Sure, why not. But if Sony say Neo will be available in October, then only 500k will switch to Neo instead? Wut? The argument seems to be that announcing it before the holidays will harm holiday sales of vanilla PS4, but if we're assuming audience overlap, wouldn't making Neo available before the holidays be just as harmful to vanilla PS4 sales, if not more so? If we're concerned for PS4's sales, why acknowledge Neo at all, if any talk of it is assumed to be harmful?

No, but some people will wait to see what early adopters and reviewers say about the Neo before committing one way or another. The last thing you want to do as a vendor is give your customer a reason to delay their purchase.
Regarding your second point, I could see that as an argument for announcing now even if it's not available until Q1, but regarding your first point, I actually don't see a lot of potential overlap between PS4 and Neo buyers, and I think the Meeting will make that clear. If a buyer has spent nearly three years for the $399 PS4 to become more affordable than $349, I don't see them pouncing on a Neo that costs $399 or more.

No, it doesn't seem likely they'd be persuaded by, "$399 is a good price, considering it's brand new tech," if the same argument didn't already persuade them to spend $399 on a PS4 three years ago, or even $349 on one last holiday. If anything, seeing new hardware for $399 again may tell those same people that's the one they should be waiting on. Anyone not already in the ecosystem has been waiting for the price to go down, not up. Basically, I think Neo will be positioned such that anyone who'd been waiting for PS4 to become affordable will be reassured that now is indeed the time to buy it, because it's gonna be even longer before the new one is similarly cheap.

It seems better for them to actively avoid having any given consumer's attention shift from buying PS4 to buying Neo. Don't sell them on the idea of getting a Neo in the future. That's what you did three years ago with the PS4 — showed them a carrot they couldn't quite reach — and they're still not a customer yet. Sell them a PS4 today instead of moving the carrot just out of reach again by showing them a "nearly affordable" Neo.

It's possible, but there haven't been any leaks at all suggesting that this is the case. So far it just seems like wishful thinking, which is entertaining in the context of your last statement:
lol That's not me hearing what I want to hear. That's me flat out rejecting the "a die shrink wasn't cost effective and/or naturally resulted in all of this extra power" rumor as ridiculous. ;p It was hard to believe from the outset, but I would think the mere existence of the SlimBone and Sony's statements that Neo isn't intended to be a replacement for the PS4 would make it even more clear to people. Guess not.

Sony hasn't really said anything at all, except to developers. What they told developers is to hurry up and meet a specific deadline in the build-up to the holiday season when they've got a lot of other work on their plate. Sure, some of that is trying to build up a library but they could just as well have required Neo patches by the end of the year for titles coming out starting September / October and have the same net effect if the console was due for release next year.

It seems clear they're trying to ensure a slate of launch titles for the Neo when it launches this Fall.
Could be. I'm not saying it's gonna be Q1. I'm mostly just trying to point out that it's incorrect when people say, "Q1 has been ruled out by ______," and yes, that technically includes the October "Neo awareness" requirement.
 

pottuvoi

Banned
"So, at 1080p, we're technically seeing 960x540 with 2x SSAA."

Saying checkerboard rending is still rendering is like saying 1080i is still 1080p. You only render every other line each time, so no.
Fixed the bit. (They shade all samples of MSAA buffer.)
It's also resolved from rotated grid sample pattern, so the sample locations are better than ordered grid would give.

Basically they render 1920x540, but with checkered pattern which in resolve fits perfectly to every other pixel in full 1920x1080 buffer. (When we leave the MSAA/SSAA part out.)
So it's 2 frames, not 4 to get full buffer.

Just the saw edge removal filter gives us an ability to have image where vertical and horizontal edges move one pixel line at a time.
Happily they also use previous frame information and it gives more refined information and shading to the image. (up to full 1080p.)

Addition to this they use TAA method with 4xMSAA sample pattern, which adds additional subsample information and refines edges etc.


In future we will see a lot more these techniques and variations which can shade variable amounts depending where it is needed or not. (Ie. Area heavily blurred by DoF or motion blur doesn't need shading for every sample, trick even Pixar used in their movies.)
Basically all temporal AA methods can be extended to reconstruct final frame higher resolution than the rendered resolution as well.
 

onQ123

Member
Why do you never respond to what's directly addressed to you and always try to drop a one liner about something else?

If you followed my request to read about it starting halfway down that slide deck you'd know it's interpolating neighbouring pixels and rendering alternating ones each frame. Checkerboard rendering doesn't mean rendering four 960x540 panels and inserting them all side by side every single frame - that would save no work over native, apart from perhaps fitting in a smaller faster memory like tiled rendering.


I'll do the scrolling work for you -
nbdn3Gg.png


Eef3rKd.png


mmuaQbD.jpg






TV upscaling was just to illustrate why "4k or 1080p" was a straw man argument. The dev shows little regression in quality, but there is some. Like I said then, better than what the internal rendering resolution is, but worse than native.

I'm not saying the method is bad. I think it's great! I also don't think the Neo will do native 4K much, that's all.



Ok, bad example, just trying to find something close as this is usually not done in games.

Nothing that you posted contradict what I said, I told people from the start that the new PS4 would do 4K using uprendering & I was attacked for it then the papers came out showing just that. You're trying to prove to me that this isn't the same thing as normal 4K doesn't make sense because I never said that but the fact is that when the final buffer is output it's going to be 4K or close to 4K. people claiming that my words are like Greenberg don't make sense either because he was talking about upscaling which has nothing to do with the output buffer.
 

ACH1LL3US

Member
What are the chances we will get Neo patches for Battlefield 4 and Driveclub? Would be really nice to get those at a steady 60fps..
 

Lady Gaia

Member
I told people from the start that the new PS4 would do 4K using uprendering & I was attacked for it then the papers came out showing just that.

Plenty of people have taken issue with the invented term "uprendering" which has no formal meaning, so it just means whatever you need it to at any given time. There has also been plenty of healthy skepticism about your insistence that we'll see significant numbers of AAA titles that aren't upscaled to reach 4K. Sony's own documentation seems to suggest that developers have been experimenting with 1440p and 1800p, which would indeed be upscaled.

There's an absolute requirement listed that in Neo mode titles must not have a worse frame rate than in base mode on launch PS4 hardware. That's going to be extremely challenging unless some sort of intermediate resolution is the target.
 

ZoyosJD

Member
Nothing that you posted contradict what I said, I told people from the start that the new PS4 would do 4K using uprendering & I was attacked for it then the papers came out showing just that. You're trying to prove to me that this isn't the same thing as normal 4K doesn't make sense because I never said that but the fact is that when the final buffer is output it's going to be 4K or close to 4K. people claiming that my words are like Greenberg don't make sense either because he was talking about upscaling which has nothing to do with the output buffer.

"Uprendering" as defined by those sony papers is more computationally expensive than native rendering of the final output. So you are completely wrong in suggesting that the NEO will have a native or uprendered 4k output in most AAA games.

Checkerboard rendering is completely different due to it's temporal nature; filling in holes with data from previously displayed pixels and thus is easily considered a form of upscaling.

Your terrible self-implied misunderstanding and misuse of terminology continues to be your convenient scapegoat.
 

onQ123

Member
Plenty of people have taken issue with the invented term "uprendering" which has no formal meaning, so it just means whatever you need it to at any given time. There has also been plenty of healthy skepticism about your insistence that we'll see significant numbers of AAA titles that aren't upscaled to reach 4K. Sony's own documentation seems to suggest that developers have been experimenting with 1440p and 1800p, which would indeed be upscaled.

There's an absolute requirement listed that in Neo mode titles must not have a worse frame rate than in base mode on launch PS4 hardware. That's going to be extremely challenging unless some sort of intermediate resolution is the target.


People having a problem with me using the correct term for getting a higher rendering output is not my problem it's their's.

Also Sony was only explaining that they didn't want devs using 1440P upscaled & would rather they used cheaper rendering techniques to get closer to 4K. they talk about upscaling in the part of the paper that's about lower resolution which is for the devs that couldn't get their game to run at 4K so they can also use the resolutions between 3200 x 1800 & 3840 x 2160. they clearly tell the devs to get in touch with them if they can't get their game over 1800P so I'm not sure why people keep saying things about 1080P & 1440P upscaled.

"Uprendering" as defined by those sony papers is more computationally expensive than native rendering of the final output. So you are completely wrong in suggesting that the NEO will have a native or uprendered 4k output in most AAA games.

Checkerboard rendering is completely different due to it's temporal nature; filling in holes with data from previously displayed pixels and thus is easily considered a form of upscaling.

Your terrible self-implied misunderstanding and misuse of terminology continues to be your convenient scapegoat.

Why is your mind so limited as to think that all uprendering will be as computationally expensive as uprendering a old game that wasn't even made to run on the console that it's being played on?


If this was just upscaling it would be no need for discussion they would just upscale all the games & devs wouldn't have to waste their time trying to make the game run at a higher resolution.


You think Sony is dumb enough to make a PS4 that's over 2X the power of PS4 & make devs do extra work just to do something that a simple upscaling chip on the console or your tv can do? but you're trying to talk to me like I'm crazy lol.


Also Checkerboard rendering isn't going to be the only way that Neo will have 4K games it's going to be volume rendering also.
 

ZoyosJD

Member
Why is your mind so limited as to think that all uprendering will be as computationally expensive as uprendering a old game that wasn't even made to run on the console that it's being played on?

Your limited mind can't comprehend that "Uprendering" is literally the process of rendering the same number of pixels that would be found in a native image in 4 separate passes in smaller buffers then expending additional processing cycles to recombine the smaller buffers into a larger one.

By definition the process is more computationally expensive than a native render regardless of what it is being played on. Doing anything less computationally expensive wouldn't be "uprendering" and would detract from IQ.
 

onQ123

Member
Your limited mind can't comprehend that "Uprendering" is literally the process of rendering the same number of pixels that would be found in a native image in 4 separate passes in smaller buffers then expending additional processing cycles to recombine the smaller buffers into a larger one.

By definition the process is more computationally expensive than a native render regardless of what it is being played on. Doing anything less computationally expensive wouldn't be "uprendering" and would detract from IQ.



OK if the final render is a higher resolution than the initial render & each pixel is unique in the final frame what has happened?

Did you up the rendering resolution or not?
 

AmyS

Member

onQ123

Member
Remember man...2 of these exist...the third one doesn't...you tell me which is the odd one out...

OK cool so when you experts start trying to explain everything in the next few months make sure to have in parenthesis ( a term created by onQ123) next the use of the word uprender , uprendering , uprendered , up-rendering , up-rendered & so on.
 

EvB

Member
OK cool so when you experts start trying to explain everything in the next few months make sure to have in parenthesis ( a term created by onQ123) next the use of the word uprender , uprendering , uprendered , up-rendering , up-rendered & so on.

The Anti-Rigby
 

Deadbeat

Banned
OK cool so when you experts start trying to explain everything in the next few months make sure to have in parenthesis ( a term created by onQ123) next the use of the word uprender , uprendering , uprendered , up-rendering , up-rendered & so on.
Uprendering is a perfectly cromulent word.
 

AmyS

Member
The GPU bump doesn't sound all the impressive. Better CPU is a definite though. Unsurprising that support would need to be patched in to take advantage of the updated hardware.

Super curious if they are also looking at a bump in RAM.

The GPU bump is fine, but bring the CPU upto 2.4 GHz for a nice 50% increase over base / OG PS4. Hopefully.
 

Avtomat

Member
I personally don't like the term uprendering as the technique described above seems to be normal upscaling + termporal scaling.

But if the uprendering term catches on well its less of a mouthful than "Temporal Upscaling"


Didn't nVidia do some kind of termporal based AA previously?
 

Caayn

Member
I'd love for once to see a clear and unambiguous definition of the term "up render". Right now, and since its inception, the definition bounced all over the place. If you make up a term at least be consistent and don't change it depending on how the wind is blowing.
I personally don't like the term uprendering as the technique described above seems to be normal upscaling + termporal scaling.

But if the uprendering term catches on well its less of a mouthful than "Temporal Upscaling"


Didn't nVidia do some kind of termporal based AA previously?
Do you mean TXAA?
 

Hexa

Member
I'd love for once to see a clear and unambiguous definition of the term "up render". Right now, and since its inception, the definition bounced all over the place. If you make up a term at least be consistent and don't change it depending on how the wind is blowing.

onQ has been using it for different things, but it was originally brought up in a Sony patent application where they defined the term and explained how it works:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160005344A1/en

As far as I know that is the only use in industry of the word uprendering.
 
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