So we've now heard a good deal about these new "upgrades". What do folks think?

I'm actually somewhat annoyed. The PS4 Pro is an upgrade for 4K but has no 4K BluRay drive. Then there's just the fact that releasing yearly upgrades is kind of annoying/scary in general. I get the feeling that this may be the end of console gaming as we know it. But maybe I'm just being pessimistic.

I'm absolutely baffled that Sony, the company that used the PS as leverage to force Blu-Ray, has released a new console without supporting the new Blu-Ray spec. From a technical standpoint the Xbone S Blu-Ray player is...well, let's call it "primitive". But it's there, in a multifunction device that is cheaper than any existing dedicated player.

From a dev perspective... two specs is not too bad. Tweak a few quality parameters here and there that you have anyway, enable a couple of the "special" shaders you didn't think would ever ship, and you're good to go. The problem is that much past two or three hardware specs starts to become a headache real quick, so I'm wondering if Sony and MS are planning to make a habit of this. It does help if the underlying architecture and chips stay basically constant. You don't want to be in the situation of dealing with perf regressions or different code paths across the variations.

From a dev perspective... two specs is not too bad. Tweak a few quality parameters here and there that you have anyway, enable a couple of the "special" shaders you didn't think would ever ship, and you're good to go.

Most currently in development (and shipped but still patching) games will be doing this at the moment, but we'll have to see how the market / critics respond going forward.
As soon as one game ships with base output of 1080p@60 and Neo output of 2160p@60, then that's going to become the benchmark that Neo versions are measured against.
"They went to full 4k rendering (even though that's 4x as many pixels and the Neo only has 2x the horsepower) without sacrificing framerate, so why doesn't your game do it to?".
Neo titles that are doing 900p->"1080p plus better shadows and post fx" will probably be judged harshly in comparison.

Optimizing properly takes a lot of time, so if you do it quickly by tweaking a few knows, your non-lead SKU (currently Neo, but I guess later, base ps4) will fall short of its potential. There's a lot of performance cliffs in modern HW that you want to push up as close to as possible while not stepping over. Things are often non intuitive too - e.g. I've got a "generate mip maps" compute shader that calculates 3 mip levels at a time to save bandwidth. It was heavily ALU bound, so I tried changing it to do just two levels at a time... The result was that it became 3x *slower* because the new LDS access pattern contained a bank conflict. This kind of stuff needs profile guided hand tuning on each console SKU :(

There's also some interesting TCR/TRC rules regarding performance, resolutions, framerates, etc, which would probably force a certain level of care onto these "half new console" ports.

The problem is that much past two or three hardware specs starts to become a headache real quick, so I'm wondering if Sony and MS are planning to make a habit of this.

God I hope not. I actually hoped the Neo/Scorpio would be a bit stronger as to actually match gaming PC's for a while.

The PS4 pro, IMO, wasn't really meant to enable 'true' 4K, nor really is the XBox Scorpio.

With the PS4 Pro they really meant to enable Playstation VR -- 1080p at rock-solid 90FPS -- so its about 2.5x faster than the regular PS4. That it happens to be just fast enough to flirt with '4K' resolution games using space-filling rendering tricks (e.g. Checker-board rendering) is a convenient side-effect, but honestly if they thought their machine was fast enough to not catch flak for 'faking it', you can bet they wouldn't have passed on the opportunity to call their new box the PS4K. I agree that its super odd that neither the PS4 Slim, nor PS4 Pro will support 4K Bluray -- there's some speculation that Sony is betting on 4K discs being an also-ran against 4K streaming, and it saves them the licensing cost as well as the cost of an upgraded disc drive.

With Scorpio, Phil Spencer has said publicly that they steak they put in the ground was to build a machine fast enough to deliver Xbox One-level visuals at real 4K resolution -- hence the machine is 4x faster than the XBox One -- anything the XBone can do at 1080p, the Scorpio can do at 4k without rendering tricks, or with rendering tricks it can do 4K at higher quality. Of course, in practice, most XBox One games aren't doing 1080p/60 -- so some combination of tricks + dynamic resolution scaling will be how most games will achieve '4K'/60.

We really need 10TFLOPS before we'll be able to do 4K right by rendering all 8million+ pixels each frame. That won't come for another generation past these impending machines.

I agree with ravyne that PS VR sounds more like a logical explanation behind the PS4 PRO.

Btw, anyone want to buy a PS4 novice? :)

The PS4 pro, IMO, wasn't really meant to enable 'true' 4K, nor really is the XBox Scorpio.

With the PS4 Pro they really meant to enable Playstation VR -- 1080p at rock-solid 90FPS -- so its about 2.5x faster than the regular PS4. That it happens to be just fast enough to flirt with '4K' resolution games using space-filling rendering tricks (e.g. Checker-board rendering) is a convenient side-effect, but honestly if they thought their machine was fast enough to not catch flak for 'faking it', you can bet they wouldn't have passed on the opportunity to call their new box the PS4K.

Porque no los dos?
They're making quite a lot of noise about 4k now, including promising that games will be able to detect if they're plugged into a HDTV or UHDTV and adjust their rendering strategy.
Yep, everyone will use checkerboard rendering, but honestly you can't tell the difference when done right. Just look at R6:Siege and their 960*540 rendering! Also, every second game is already doing TAA to get the quality of 8xAA with the cost of 1x. The modern checkerboard techniques will fold into the TAA code.

VR is interesting though, as Sony have stated that they support 60, 90 and 120Hz display rates (and a game with 60Hz output could be reprojected to a 120Hz output signal too - the PC headsets do this for 45Hz game output already), so devs have a few choices available here depending on the experience they're creating.
On PC VR, you pretty much NEED to supersample by about 1.7x just to get a 1:1 pixel output, thanks to the lens distortion. If we cal it 2x for neatness, then a PSVR game compared to a 1080p@60Hz game could be anywhere from 2x to 4x the pixel cost (plus the overhead of having two views...). So Neo having 2x the horsepower allows baseline 60Hz reprojected to 120Hz VR, but still needs special tricks (or content/quality cuts) to hit 'true' 90/120Hz VR.
However, there's also variable resolution rendering being pushed by Nvidia on PC (where different parts of a render target have different sample density / pixel size) via a grid of 9 viewports and a fancy geometry shader. This can reduce costs by up to 2x if you push it... So if Sony/AMD have figured out something like this to put in Neo and recommend to PSVR devs how to use it properly, that would definitely make Neo a VR-ready machine :D

I was hoping they dat least put a 4K bluray player, but since that isn't happening I'm not seeing why I'd get one. This, imo may be a mistake, along with Scorpio.

This may be the first time Nintendo releasing a less powerful console is actually beneficial and worth buying, IMO.

I'm late to the party and have no PS4 or XBO so i think i will get both the Ps4 Pro and the XBO Scorpi. Time to go next gen :). Anyone have any good articles on checkerboard rendering? I need to read up what the fuzz is about :wub: