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PlayStation (Games) Software News Entertainment Games Hardware Technology

Mark Cerny, Chief PlayStation Architect, Explains the PS4 Pro (theverge.com) 71

Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro, which launches next month on November 10th, is the company's most powerful console that will be capable of outputting 4K and HDR content, including movies, TV shows and games. In an effort to find out how developers will make use of the console and whether or not the PS4 Pro will in any way undermine the audience of the current PS4, The Verge sat down with Mark Cerny, Sony's chief PlayStation architect, and asked him some questions. The Verge reports: The PS4 Pro is 2.28 times more powerful than its predecessor, but not everything will run in native 4K
Instead of using an entirely new GPU, Cerny said the PS4 Pro is using a "double-sauced one." In effect, the new console has a second, identical GPU configured next to the original, more than doubling the processing power of the Pro. While the standard PS4 produces 1.8 teraflops, the PS4 Pro achieves 4.2 teraflops. This is how the device can achieve native 4K and, in some cases, what Cerny said are results "extremely close to 4K." For select software, including games like adventure title Horizon Zero Dawn and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the PS4 Pro will use a crafty technique called checkerboard rendering to achieve 2160p resolution. Checkboard rendering changes the formation of pixels to achieve higher-fidelity graphics.

Standard PS4 games will play just the same unless devs patch them
For the more than 700 or so existing PS4 games, Cerny said the goal was to ensure those titles played smoothly no matter what. That's why the Pro incorporates an identical GPU. Because the new console has "the old GPU next to a mirror version of itself," Sony can support existing games with a simple trick: "We just turn off the second GPU," he said. Developers can patch these titles to boost graphics and performance in very subtle ways. But unless you have a 4K television, the difference will not be substantial.

Sony says it doesn't want games released solely for the PS4 Pro
When asked whether Sony would ever let a game run exclusively on the PS4 Pro, Cerny was blunt. "We're putting a very high premium on not splitting the user base in that fashion," he said. That doesn't rule out the possibility that, two or even three years down the line, a game comes out that relies so heavily on the hardware improvements of the Pro that it becomes unplayable on the standard PS4. Cerny wouldn't really speak much to that scenario, saying that Sony is asking developers to take advantage of the new console without leaving older hardware behind.
You can also watch Mark Cerny chat with PlayStation Blog's Sid Shuman about the creation of the PS4 Pro here on YouTube.
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Mark Cerny, Chief PlayStation Architect, Explains the PS4 Pro

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  • Nice Try (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    But, I'm still not falling for you rootkit shenanigans, Sony.

    • I think it's time to let the 2005 Sony BMG rootkit on a music CD scandal go. 10 years is l good time to hold them accountable, but I don't think you should hold Sony hardware division accountable for Sony BMG's bad action for the rest of existence.
      • I'm glad they pay you well, but we can and will hold them accountable for the rest of the company's existence.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ShooterNeo ( 555040 )

          So I take it you don't own either console, since Microsoft has done a long list of dick things that make the rootkit scandal appear minor. So uhh...do you own a gaming PC? Do you know how many dick things AMD and Nvidia have done that you should be holding against them for the rest of their lives as companies?

          Frankly, I'm surprised you have a computer at all. If you are going to be consistent and boycott every consumer good sold by a company that did an ultra-dick thing at one point in it's history, you

        • by Etcetera ( 14711 )

          I'm glad they pay you well, but we can and will hold them accountable for the rest of the company's existence.

          In my official capacity as an ex- Sony employee and a 5-digit Slashdot UID holder: You're a f**king idiot.

          • In my official capacity as an ex- Sony employee and a 5-digit Slashdot UID holder: You're a f**king idiot.

            No coincidence I guess that you treat your fellow readers like Sony treats its customers

  • by eric31415927 ( 861917 ) on Thursday October 20, 2016 @07:32PM (#53119401)

    ... does it run Linux?

  • Ultrahd? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jason777 ( 557591 ) on Thursday October 20, 2016 @07:37PM (#53119423)
    How bout he explain why there is no Ultra HD blu ray drive in this thing? And how the $300 xbone s has one?
    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      How bout he explain why there is no Ultra HD blu ray drive in this thing? And how the $300 xbone s has one?

      Because the PlayStation is a games machine. Not a media machine.

      The reason why when the PS4 was first introduced, it was shown gaming, while whent he Xbone was introduced, it was the media features being demonstrated.

      The Xbone plays games and media and Microsoft positioned it as something you use for everything in the living room. The PS4 is solely a games machine.

      And given the PS4 is doing well, why s

      • Re:Ultrahd? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Friday October 21, 2016 @03:28AM (#53120721)

        How bout he explain why there is no Ultra HD blu ray drive in this thing? And how the $300 xbone s has one?

        Because the PlayStation is a games machine. Not a media machine.

        The reason why when the PS4 was first introduced, it was shown gaming, while whent he Xbone was introduced, it was the media features being demonstrated.

        The Xbone plays games and media and Microsoft positioned it as something you use for everything in the living room. The PS4 is solely a games machine.

        And given the PS4 is doing well, why should Sony innovate in that aspect? Don't fix what isn't broken. The Xbone is selling not so well, so Microsoft needs to innovate to increase sales. So far, it appears to work.

        Kind of ironinc when they used the ps2 to push dvd and the ps3 to push bluray now they're like fuck that, no one wants to watch discs on their consoles that are hooked up to the big tvs, oh no.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          How bout he explain why there is no Ultra HD blu ray drive in this thing? And how the $300 xbone s has one?

          Because the PlayStation is a games machine. Not a media machine.

          The reason why when the PS4 was first introduced, it was shown gaming, while whent he Xbone was introduced, it was the media features being demonstrated.

          The Xbone plays games and media and Microsoft positioned it as something you use for everything in the living room. The PS4 is solely a games machine.

          And given the PS4 is doing well, why should Sony innovate in that aspect? Don't fix what isn't broken. The Xbone is selling not so well, so Microsoft needs to innovate to increase sales. So far, it appears to work.

          Kind of ironinc when they used the ps2 to push dvd and the ps3 to push bluray now they're like fuck that, no one wants to watch discs on their consoles that are hooked up to the big tvs, oh no.

          In fact, all I've ever used my PS3 for is to watch Blurays and DVDs.

          • Agreed, I'm in the same boat. Sony doesn't like this because then they're not getting any additional revenue from you on game sales. In fact, it looks like they went to good lengths to neuter the media-center capabilities of the PS4 compared to the PS3 for these reasons.

            That of course ignores people like myself who might have multiple consoles for different rooms in the house (because it's more convenient to have buy the a device that plays games and discs than to have a blu-ray player in one room and a PS3

      • If that is true, then why are they doing streaming movies? Your argument fails.
      • Because the PlayStation is a games machine. Not a media machine.

        I seem to recall Sony positioning the Playstation as a media machine. First and foremost they advertised it as one of the best and most widely available bluray players when it first came out. The first bluray player to conform to the new specs of the day, and it was cheaper than most off the shelf bluray players too.

        • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          I seem to recall Sony positioning the Playstation as a media machine. First and foremost they advertised it as one of the best and most widely available bluray players when it first came out. The first bluray player to conform to the new specs of the day, and it was cheaper than most off the shelf bluray players too.

          That was the PS3. The PS4 Sony realigned it as a games machine. Re-watch the introductions and you'll see Sony demoing games, while Microsoft demoing everything BUT games in the first introducti

      • Because the PlayStation is a games machine. Not a media machine.

        Articles like this:
        http://blog.us.playstation.com... [playstation.com]

        Would seem to indicate otherwise.

    • They want it to be cheap enough, and are betting on savvy gamers (the target audience here) to be more into streaming services than physical media

  • It sounds a lot like the original PS3 that could play PS2 games natively. Just with further enhanced capability to adapt the games through what is probably not a simply tweak, so not all older games will get the update. I like the idea a lot.
    • The original PS3 had PS2 hardware inside of it to handle the backwards compatibility (I had one! It sounded like a goddamned turbine). The PS4 Pro is just going to be upgraded components, so it's more akin to upgrading a PC, but devs will have to release patches to make use of the extra horsepower.

      • Except it clearly states that it uses separate hardware for the old and new style games. The old PS4 hardware for old games, and new/patched games turned off the PS4 hardware and the PS4 Pro hardware turns on.
        • You made me RTFA, dammit.

          There's just an extra GPU that's identical to the old one. Games that support the Pro, through patch or on release, use the extra GPU, and unsupported games leave it off. All games use at least one of the two GPUs, and share the rest of the hardware. The PS3/PS2 comparison feels off to me because the PS2 hardware was completely distinct and different from the PS3's. No PS3 games used it (that I've heard of).

  • Other articles on this were speculating that the PS4 pro used the same GPU as the AMD RX 480. That's a ~5.8 terraflop GPU, and they were assuming that Sony was clocking it down to save on power supply requirements, fan noise, and cooler size requirements.

    That's NOT what they did. The RX 480 uses a new architecture and wouldn't be instruction compatible. Games that use a higher level API would work but I suspect the highest performance PS4 games are bare metal optimized. Doubling the GPU means they get l

    • "Bare-metal" coding / optimization on modern consoles isn't really a thing anymore, according to colleagues working on current gen console games (I worked on consoles two generations ago, but have been mostly on PC since then). Modern console game code, as far as I know, doesn't have access to raw hardware - it's all done through API libraries provided by the OS.

      This means that minor changes to hardware specs don't matter as much, since the console OS provides a hardware abstraction layer just like the PC

      • Maybe. From what I've read, the combination of GPU compute instructions and a shared memory space means there's benefits to assembly level optimization. There may be APIs and you may be able to write your compute shader code in C, but it's still basically bare metal. A different shader architecture is going to be different. Also, while it might no longer make sense to optimize if you're writing a single game, the vendors of Havok and UE4 and so forth do have an incentive to make their products better by

        • It's important to make the distinction between platform-specific optimization and "hardware-level" optimization. The former undoubtedly occurs (e.g. managing video memory buffers, which is one area the two platforms have some significant differences), but doesn't necessarily imply hardware-level access, like what used to happen on the PS2 (since those didn't even have an OS to speak of). All that stuff is typically managed through OS-level APIs these days, not by poking around in raw memory.

          So, when I say

  • Is it just me or does Sony seem to have some sort of obsession with "size'?
    Remembering the previous PS incarnations they've always been about the most pixels and power.
    You'd have thought they'd learned their lesson back when Nintendo trumped them with a less powerful console, introducing Wii motion, focusing instead on user experience and not just eye candy and processor power.
    It's just a shame Nintendo didn't do it again yesterday.

    • The Wii was an odd beast and I suspect the wider industry is right not to emulate it. At the time of its launch, the Wii was supported by a particular press and publicity zeitgeist that gave it a big advantage over two rivals who appeared desperate to shoot themselves in their feet (MS with the RROD fiasco, Sony with the PS3's price-tag). It also had a quickly-grasped concept that appealed to a lot of people who didn't usually play games.

      The problem is, while the Wii made some super-profits in the first 2-3

      • Sorry, sorry, the PS4 had, of course, been on sale two and a half years, not three and a half, at the point it broke the 40 million sales barrier.

  • Does this mean we can finally get decent AA filtering on PS4?
    I don't care about 4K, I'd be fine with 1080p if the PS4 could do decent AA.

    The jagged edges are horrible on PS4. What good is it that it looks pretty if everything has jagged edges? Immediately throws me off.

    If the current library is improved with new hardware, I might buy one.
    But I suspect it won't make a difference with AA on current titles without a game update.

  • Since I don't have a 4K HDR television (planned for next summer though), I'm not likely to pick up a Pro immediately. However, reviews can sway me, based on a very simple criterium: does it significantly improve PSVR. I've been extremely happy with my headset so far, but I do notice that some games look better in it than others, especially when it comes to anti-aliasing. I'm not expecting the Pro to improve upon the best experiences, but if it raises the median and average quality towards the best ones, it'

  • How about use what you go. I haven't seen a platformer actually use everything available for 1080p let alone 4K. What is the purpose of it all if no video games are made to take advantage of it. There there is the whole thing where you actually need a 4K TV to actually use it which most people don't have. I suppose if movies existed (which I don't think they even do) they might be able to take advantage of it, but then you're getting away from the primary purpose of the console anyway. I mean I haven't see

  • not everything will run in native 4K

    I think thath should read as "basically nothing will run in native 4K but at least actual resolutions will reach full HD".

  • They say they don't want Ps Pro only games but ultimately if the Pro takes off they don't have a choice.

    I'm sure a dev could have their game "run" on a PS4 Vanilla. In 480P. With wireframe graphics. At 15fps.

    It won't go quite that far simply because there isn't that kind of difference between the two machines but running on a Ps4 and "Running in a way that you'd actually want to play the damn thing" are two very different concepts.

    • They say they don't want Ps Pro only games but ultimately if the Pro takes off they don't have a choice.

      Almost any PC game has graphics tuning. No reason the same thing can't be put into console games.

  • It'll get you some prettier games for a price that'll likely be obscenely expensive for a traditional home console- and by having the requirement of no PS4:Pro exclusive games, they're really limiting what the devs can do/come up with. You can use the extra processing power to make things prettier or maybe add a few more enemies to the screen at a time... but is that really worth an entirely new console to people?

    At this point you really are better off getting a PC in most cases. It probably wont' do 4K
  • It's about loose gamers to PC. Sony already said that. Young people don't play anymore on TV. They play on mobile. Hardcores on PC. Microsoft realized this trying to offer the same Xbox experience on Windows. Nintendo realized this and it's releasing a hybrid portable/console. Sony has only the PlayStation platform. If hardcores start to move that much to PC, they're doomed.

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