SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Sony has announced the PlayStation Neo, formerly referred to as "PS4.5" or "PS4K", and Microsoft has announced the Xbox "Project Scorpio". Both will be "mid-cycle refreshes" of the preceding consoles that will significantly boost graphics power, supposedly allowing for existing games to be played at a minimum of 1080p/60FPS, using virtual reality headsets, or at 4K (2160p):
And so gamers have been promised a console for release in 2017 that packs a whopping 6 teraflops of processing power (compared to the current Xbox One's mere 1.31), along with a much improved 320GB/s of memory bandwidth. Even ignoring some of Microsoft's more questionable claims (uncompressed pixels anyone?), those are some impressive specs. Forget 1080p/60fps: Microsoft says that this system is more than enough hardware to push a VR headset (the company isn't saying which one yet, but I'd bet on Oculus), and run regular games at 4K resolution with support for High Dynamic Range (HDR).
[...] The PlayStation Neo has it even harder. Leaked specs put its performance at somewhere around 4.2 teraflops, while its 36 GCN compute units clocked at 911MHz strongly suggest it's using a form of AMD's upcoming Polaris architecture, most likely a down-clocked RX 480. Memory bandwidth is up compared to the PS4 at 218GB/s but far behind that of Scorpio. At this stage, those specs are unlikely to change, particularly as developer kits have already gone out to developers. A radical redesign to match Scorpio's GPU—which, given what we know about AMD's GPU lineup and the cooling setup in Project Scorpio, is likely to be a down-clocked version of Vega rather than an overlocked Polaris—is pretty much off the table.
The two consoles should be available sometime in 2017. Sony is also launching a PSVR head-mounted display on October 13th.
If nothing else, the enhanced capabilities of these new consoles will help relieve "consolitis" (PC games being held back by weak consoles). Both consoles are likely to feature another 8-core AMD CPU: either a higher-clocked Jaguar or possibly a Zen processor.
Previously: Sony Rumored to Be Developing PlayStation 4.5
(Score: 2) by Celestial on Thursday June 16 2016, @05:35PM
No longer entirely true. Consoles are definitely still less powerful than PCs, and you will still have to replace it every so often. However, now that the Xbox runs on x86-64 based hardware, Microsoft has stated that they intend for all Xbox One games to run on all current and future Xbox consoles. So, if Microsoft sticks to their word (yes, I know), the inability to play old games on new consoles is no longer an issue as of now. For the Xbox at least.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Thursday June 16 2016, @06:09PM
Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. Sony did it with the first gen PS3's, I have one with PS1 and 2 compatibility, but they ditched that. I suspect the issue with backward compatibility is people aren't going to run out and buy the latest games for a new console. They'll play their old ones and bide they're time until the games they want are released. They don't make money off the consoles so if people aren't buying games, for the sake of having games for their console, they're not making any money. MS might go one gen with backward compatibility, but i think they'll artificially gimp that later to force people to go buy new games.
I'm pretty sure the PS4 is also x86 based, which was they're excuse for not being PS3 backward compatible because the PS3 was a parallel cell processor. I could be wrong though. I think it's only a matter of time before someone gets emulators working to play PS4 and XBox games on a PC. Should be easy enough given most gaming PCs are way more powerful than even up-to-date consoles and they're using the same CPU architecture.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe