New PS4 Delivers "Ultra-High Definition Resolution Graphics," Report Says

@ghost140: That's why I feel bad for those buying an X1 and PS4 now. I wouldn't be surprised if these are out this fall.

@ghost140: If this is real, and it looks like it, I bet E3. Gotta be.

@ghost140: If I was Sony, I wouldn't want to confirm anything until I really had to. As soon as I said there was a new, better PS4 coming, sales of the current PS4 would drop right off.

@Elranzer: at least the Ps4 has decent games, 3rd party support, a great controller, comes with integrated wifi and an ethernet port, has a decent online store, the controller has a decent battery life....you get the point?

@Elranzer: its not "the new PS4" it "PS4U" !

@clugaman: Yeah but the chances are it won't be able to even produce 30fps at 4K, unless graphics are turned all the way down to lowest settings.

@clugaman: There's basically no chance that it will run 4K at 30 frames. Take a look at this: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/225476-playstation-4k-is-reportedly-real-but-what-kind-of-performance-can-we-expect

That's a $700 graphics card getting 18 FPS on a 3 year-old game. Also, that card is too big to fit in a PS4 and generates too much heat for a console to disperse effectively. The most likely outcome is that it upscales to 4K.

While it will almost certainly have the power to run current games at higher FPS, those games are already *locked* at 30 FPS. So only if devs patch them will it be possible to run at 60 FPS. But even then, as Stebsis says, the physics is often locked to FPS.

@clugaman: Yes it guarantees, but do you really think Sony is gonna give that choice? They don't care about framerate because they can't sell that, if they can slap 4K sticker on every game then they're gonna keep that but still lock games at 30 because it's a console. And that'd be more work for devs too if the physics and whatnot are tied to framerate which they often are in console games

@Kjranu: No one who bought a PS4 is going to buy a PS4.5, they'll just wait till the PS5, if at all due to Sony fatigue.

@HesamB: Like between PC and consoles. The lowest common denominator will prevail more often than not, but you will have more graphics options.

@HesamB: I think it's quite possible to design this so that there's no audience-division.

The key, of course, is that Sony has pretty much absolute control over both the hardware and what devs can do on the platform (all software releases are checked by and must be explicitly OK'd by Sony).

(1) Make this exactly the same hardware-wise, except with a beefier GPU and maybe CPU speed Make sure all differences are either completely transparent to software or very easy to abstract away in libraries, e.g. things like texture resolution.

(2) Make very strict rules for devs that games must run acceptably on both models, e.g. a minimum of 30 FPS on the existing hardware, and in general only allow changes that are related to resolution and frame-rate. I suppose they could for instance allow some extra "sugar-coating" on the higher-end mode, like higher-poly models etc, as long as the lower-end experience was still good, but they'd have to keep an eye on this, and simple differences like texture resolution are easier to police.

(3) Maybe enhance the existing software infrastructure so that any higher-resolution textures used for the higher-end model can be downloaded separately or something, so that the download sizes don't increase for users that can't take advantage of them.

@HesamB: PS4 gasm would run as they do now and the PS4k would have a higher res, FPS or both, quite simple really.

@HesamB: It won't divide audiences. The new games will have two settings, one optimized for the UltraHD PS4 and another for the regular PS4. Not that complicated a feat to do.

@HesamB: If you think about it, this will not divide audiences. Just like the pc all the players play together just some are in higher definition.