As a consumer I'd probably be pissed if I owned a ps4/Xbone :lol:

And many are... yet I am failing a little bit to understand WHY exactly they are this pissed (I understand the guys that bought their consoles months ago, not aware of the rumours doing the rounds at the time).

Consumers don't have to make sense or base their feeling on logic :D
If you buy a box for $200 and next week John buys the same box for $100, you feel like you paid too much, even though you were happy at the time.
If you buy a box for $200 and next week John buys a better box for $200, you feel like you paid too much, even though you were happy at the time.

PS4 has 40 million units sold already. A business can target the PS4.5 with X potential customers, or PS4 with X+40M potential customers.

While the extra cool stuff might be fun for developers and consumers, the business decision is going to include those extra 40M consoles already present in people's homes. There will of course be a small number of products targeting it, but the vast majority will continue to target the base units.

You're forgetting the gatekeeper power. If Sony says so, then every developer must target the PS4 base and do something extra on the PS4.5 (such as higher resolutions), or you don't get to ship.

Customers don't have to make sense, sure... I am still trying to understand it and fail to do so. Might be my mistake.

There is always Envy... still Business will deliver better products which either favours people who have more money (unlikely in this case), or people who wait longer. If anything, this will teach people to not early adopt a new console. Which actually is a good life lesson in common sense even without a midcycle hardware upgrade (Even though it might be less good for the devs and console producers, without the mindless early adopters, a console is doomed).

How many ESSENTIAL exclusives are there already for the PS4? So unless you use the PS4 as a cheap game PC substitute (in which case you got 2-3 years of usable low midrange performance), what did you miss by waiting for the mid cycle refresh?

I think this exactly is why having a gatekeeper sometimes is good for the customer. Without it, either the new PS4 Neo would be a wild success and after some time the old PS4 would fall to the wayside.... or the other way around.

Sucks for the devs somewhat, but again: how is this any different to PC development? Is it such a hassle to lock the game to 30 Hz for the Ps4, and unlock 60 Hz for the Neo?

Sucks for the devs somewhat, but again: how is this any different to PC development? Is it such a hassle to lock the game to 30 Hz for the Ps4, and unlock 60 Hz for the Neo?

To be as simple as that, the game would have to already run at +30Hz, so that you can lock it (probably by implementing vsync).

I've worked on a low-budget game, where I've been brought on 6 months before release with the job of ensuring we ship at 30Hz... Which involves touching the entire lighting system, material systems, texture pipeline, including tools used by the artists, all the post processing systems, LOD systems and tools, batching and sorting systems, micro-optimizing FMADs in shaders, instruction scheduling, hand-vectorizing code, micro-optimizing LHS's in the low level renderer API, etc, etc...
This wasn't just me, but also a graphics programmer, engine programmer, and technical artist, and all of the re-work that we forced onto the art team.
All up, that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work...
...and large parts of that work are platform-specific, such as hand-picking the scheduling of shader instructions for a specific GPU.

PC is different because you're not trying so hard to get the game running perfectly on one HW configuration. If the user doesn't like their framerate, they can drop the resolution until they're happy, or buy better hardware :lol:
Having scalable graphics settings, and having multiple HW configs is a different headache, but there's so much less pressure to get each one perfect.

For an example of the difference, look at the quality and framerate of GTAV on PS3 where it's been hand tuned, vs a PC with a GeForce 7900GT 256MB (roughly equivalent).
That's actually a trick question, because that PC won't even run it, so you have to cheat and use a much more powerful GeForce 9800 GT 1GB, and probably get worse quality/performance due to it not being hand tweaked for that specific HW :LOL:

So on PS4, you might spend a quarter million dollars ensuring your game hits 1080p 30 Hz at the very best quality settings possible, and then find that it only gets 1080p 55Hz on Neo, which may as well be 30Hz after vsync... At which point you get senior engineers to see exactly how the code is being executed by this other GPU, down to the scheduling of waveforms, and try to tweak it to be slightly faster without losing quality so that you can hit this new arbitrary performance benchmark... Which could be more months of work again.


[edit]
Or check this out; this is what "locking it to 30" looks like in reality:

Gamers see that and think "lazy devs". I see that and think about the massive amount of work that's been done to get those original demo's running at a consistent framerate on console hardware.

Sucks for the devs somewhat, but again: how is this any different to PC development? Is it such a hassle to lock the game to 30 Hz for the Ps4, and unlock 60 Hz for the Neo?

To be as simple as that, the game would have to already run at +30Hz, so that you can lock it (probably by implementing vsync).

I've worked on a low-budget game, where I've been brought on 6 months before release with the job of ensuring we ship at 30Hz... Which involves touching the entire lighting system, material systems, texture pipeline, including tools used by the artists, all the post processing systems, LOD systems and tools, batching and sorting systems, micro-optimizing FMADs in shaders, instruction scheduling, hand-vectorizing code, micro-optimizing LHS's in the low level renderer API, etc, etc...
This wasn't just me, but also a graphics programmer, engine programmer, and technical artist, and all of the re-work that we forced onto the art team.
All up, that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work...
...and large parts of that work are platform-specific, such as hand-picking the scheduling of shader instructions for a specific GPU.

PC is different because you're not trying so hard to get the game running perfectly on one HW configuration. If the user doesn't like their framerate, they can drop the resolution until they're happy, or buy better hardware :lol:
Having scalable graphics settings, and having multiple HW configs is a different headache, but there's so much less pressure to get each one perfect.

For an example of the difference, look at the quality and framerate of GTAV on PS3 where it's been hand tuned, vs a PC with a GeForce 7900GT 256MB (roughly equivalent).
That's actually a trick question, because that PC won't even run it, so you have to cheat and use a much more powerful GeForce 9800 GT 1GB, and probably get worse quality/performance due to it not being hand tweaked for that specific HW :lol:

So on PS4, you might spend a quarter million dollars ensuring your game hits 1080p 30 Hz at the very best quality settings possible, and then find that it only gets 1080p 55Hz on Neo, which may as well be 30Hz after vsync... At which point you get senior engineers to see exactly how the code is being executed by this other GPU, down to the scheduling of waveforms, and try to tweak it to be slightly faster without losing quality so that you can hit this new arbitrary performance benchmark... Which could be more months of work again.


[edit]
Or check this out; this is what "locking it to 30" looks like in reality:

Gamers see that and think "lazy devs". I see that and think about the massive amount of work that's been done to get those original demo's running at a consistent framerate on console hardware.

I am not attacking ANYONE really with my post... it is more like a question (maybe poorly worded). I know people spend a lot of time optimizing console titles to make sure it runs perfect on the fixed hardware specs. Still, I fail to see the big differences between the two "platforms" this time...

So you work hard to ensure 30Hz on the old PS4.... now you need to also implement a Neo mode. In my opinion all you do is throw the same config in, test it again to ensure it is running at 60Hz on the Neo hardware. And as this newer hardware happens to be just about 100-120% faster, that should be it in most cases (depends on the IPC gains with Polaris, as well as the exact IPC gains with Zen, and how the parts of the system that haven't changed (like the GDDR5) might or might not bottleneck the speedup, but should be about 200% as fast).

I would understand the pain if the new config would be 150% of the old. I would be all "WTF Sony!" ... but with 200%, things should be fairly easy (they never are in reality, I know). Shouldn't it?

Hm, reading your response again, maybe you are right. Guess not every game might scale so perfectly between the different hardware configs. The Neo IS just at the limit, a little bit imperfect scaling and you have to tweak again. Guess MS will make the devs life easier, as the new machine has so much more power that going from 30 Hz on the XBone to 60 Hz on the scorpio will never be a problem.... unless people then expect you to also support 4K (its 4 times the graphics power after all), you run into a bottleneck somewhere, and you need to tweak again to prevent the game from running at 20 Hz :)

On the other hand, if the game is tweaked to run at sub-1080p resolutions for the old PS4, you can simply up the resolution to 1080p.... going from 900p to 1080p is about a 44% increase, that should be acheivable without problems (though yeah, needs to be tested again of course).

"...and large parts of that work are platform-specific, such as hand-picking the scheduling of shader instructions for a specific GPU" - ouch, didn't knew about that. I really hope the old GCN and the new Polaris GCN (1.4?) architecture are similar enough that this wouldn't be a problem? Because else, yeah, that might slow down things again.

Is there any ruling in place that Neo Mode HAS to bring graphical improvements? Can you just deploy the same config twice? Or does Sony require you to bring an improved version of your game for the Neo Mode?

Any details on Scorpio's RAM?

320GB/s which matches GDDR5X on a 256bit bus. (IIRC it's the same bandwidth of the GTX1080)