... Why? It was basically a bunch of VR stuff, which is great and all but we knew this year would be like this.

All I can say about playstation's conference is , Good god this is amazing. Seems like I have to buy a ps4 now*.

*After the PS4 Neo is out.

Based on what some Industry Vets say about the current specs of the Neo , the scorpio far out powers it. I wonder if that's why they didn't present it

At the end of the day this stuff is built from commodity chips in different clothing. They'll have plenty of time to match the specs on the other side.

I'm buying the Xbone S simply because I have a full 4K home theater setup that isn't playing any 4K content. Standalone 4K Blu-Rays players are running at a stupid $400 price point right now. Instead I can get a fully featured player that is also a full game console and streaming box.

The real interest for me is not 4K but VR, but consoles having the power to support 4K at 60hz is a performance water-level that directly benefits VR - the Occulus' resolution is half 4K at 90hz. (It's two 1K's - 1K for each eye).

Basically, even if you don't care about 4K TVs, "supports 4K" is a marketing term that basically means "has buttloads of graphical power".

4k support literally just means that the video-out hardware can put a native 4k signal over the cable, so your 4k TV's upscaler won't kick in. Instead, the xbone slim will do the upscaling from 900p or whatever shitty res your games are running at, and has no extra GPU horsepower :lol:

720p is 1280 × 720 = 921600 (11% of 4k).

900p is 1600 × 900 = 1440000 (17% of 4k).

1080p is 1920 × 1080 = 2073600 (25% of 4k).

PSVR is 960 × 1080 × 2 = 1080p :)

4k res is 3840 × 2160 = 8294400 (100%).

Oculus Rift is 1080 ×1200 × 2 = 2592000 (31% of 4k).

However, due to Rift's image warping, you want to actually render at something like 1.7x resolution, so: 1836 × 2040 × 2 = 7490880 (90% of 4k).

So yeah -- if they can do 4k@60Hz, they're in the same ballpark as Rift@90Hz or PSVR@120Hz...

But that's a bit if.

Currently, the consoles struggle to do 1080p@60Hz. Games are shipping at 900p@30Hz and even 720p!

The new "hardware refresh" versions are rumored to have double the GPU horsepower, which would allow a current-gen1080p@60Hz game to reach 4k@30Hz... but only barely able to cope with Rift@90Hz -- and nowhere near capable of the >1.0x resolution boost that's recommended.

And a less favorable current-gen game that's running at 900p@30Hz would only manage 4k@10Hz on the new hardware :( So it wouldn't actually render at 4k, it would just upscale to 4k and output a 4k signal to your UHD TV.

VR on consoles is still going to require some big steps back in graphical features, even after a hardware refresh.